Law Commons^™

The Future Of Electioneering In Wyoming, Alex Beezley

SLU Law Journal Online

Wyoming's electioneering law is among the most expansive in the country. In this article, Alex Beezley examines a recently filed lawsuit challenging the law and predicts how the court will decide the case based on the Supreme Court's reasoning in Burson v. Freeman.

Tailoring Election Regulation: The Platform Is The Frame, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

According to conventional wisdom, legislative efforts to limit platform-based electoral manipulation—including especially laws that go beyond simply mandating additional disclosure about advertising expenditures—are most likely doomed to swift judicial invalidation. In this Essay, I bracket questions about baseline First Amendment coverage and focus on the prediction of inevitable fatality following strict scrutiny. Legislation aimed at electoral manipulation rightly confronts serious concerns about censorship and chilling effects, but the ways that both legislators and courts approach such legislation will also be powerfully influenced by framing choices that inform assessment of whether challenged legislation is responsive to claimed harms and appropriately tailored …

Making Corporate Law More Communitarian: A Proposed Response To The Roberts Court's Personification Of Corporations, Robert M. Ackerman, Lance Cole

Brooklyn Law Review

Both Citizens United and Hobby Lobby are notable for the Roberts Court’s personification of the corporation. In Citizens United, the United States Supreme Court expanded corporate speech rights in a political context; in Hobby Lobby, it accorded religious rights to corporations in an unprecedented manner. This article explains how the Court’s expansion of corporate personification has ignored both traditional corporate law doctrine regarding shareholder primacy and the fundamental distinction in corporate law between the corporate entity and the shareholders who control it.

The article takes a communitarian approach to corporate law analysis, recognizing that corporations play useful roles …

After Citizens United: Extending The Liberal Revolution To The Multinational Corporation, Daniel J.H. Greenwood

Daniel J.H. Greenwood

This Article proposes several routes to reverse Citizens United, the Supreme Court case holding that corporate campaign spending is “speech” protected by the First Amendment.

The core problem of Citizens United is that corporations are illegitimate participants in our politics. Corporate law requires corporate officers to pursue the corporate interest. They are thus disqualified from considering the central political questions of a democratic capitalist country: defining the rules of the market (which define corporate interests) and balancing profit against other, more important, values.

The high road to fixing Citizens United is a constitutional amendment to extend the fundamental insights …

Charities In Politics: A Reappraisal, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Federal law significantly limits the political activities of charities, but no one really knows why. In the wake of Citizens United, the absence of any strong normative grounding for the limits may leave the rules vulnerable to constitutional challenge. This Article steps into that breach, offering a set of policy reasons to separate politics from charity. I also sketch ways in which my more-precise exposition of the rationale for the limits helps guide interpretation of the complex legal rules implementing them.

Any defense of the political limits begins with significant challenges because of a long tradition of scholarly criticism of …

Can Freedom Of Speech Bear The Twenty-First Century's Weight?, Lillian R. Bevier

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Manipulation In Political Prediction Markets, Alexandra Lee Newman

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

No abstract provided.

Saving The Preachers The Tax Code's Prohibition On Church Electioneering, Nicholas P. Cafardi

Nicholas P. Cafardi

Malignant Democracy: Core Fallacies Underlying Election Of The Judiciary, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

There is no requirement of democratic theory that mandates that all public offices be filled by election. This is particularly true in modern democratic states, which are simply too large to justify the administrative burden of electing everyone who has significant responsibilities in our society.

Examples of this are everywhere in modern democracies, such as the United States and Europe. In England, for example, the Prime Minister is not directly elected by the people. Does this mean Great Britain has ceased to be a democracy? In most large, sophisticated nation-states, national cabinet officers have great power but are the political …

How Charitable Organizations Influence Federal Tax Policy: "Rent-Seeking" Charities Or Virtuous Politicians?, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

Tax-exempt charitable organizations exert considerable influence over Congress, the Department of the Treasury, and the Internal Revenue Service in matters dealing with exemption from federal income tax and the tax deductibility of charitable contributions. This Article uses both public choice and public interest analysis to help identify various features of the charitable community and explain how exempt organizations weild political influence despite the restrictions placed on their activities under the tax code. Arguing that the influence of charitable organizations over tax policy can be explained from either a public choice or public interest vantage point, the Article concluds that the …

Constitutional Law - Freedom Of Speech And Press - Prohibitions On The Publication Or Distribution Of Anonymous Campaign Literature, Frank G. Reeder S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

Defendant was charged under a federal statute' with the publication and distribution of a pamphlet which concerned a candidate for United States Senator in a special senatorial election and which did not contain the name of the person or group responsible for its publication and distribution as required by the statute. The defendant alleged that his occupation as a farmer made him particularly subject to regulation by the federal government, and that he feared coercion or reprisals from the federal representatives with whom he dealt if he complied with the statute's disclosure requirement. On motion to dismiss the information on …