Law Commons^™

Business Lobbying As An Informational Public Good: Can Tax Deductions For Lobbying Expenses Promote Transparency?, Michael Halberstam, Stuart G. Lazar

Stuart Lazar

The view that “lobbying is essentially an informational activity” has persistently served the suggestion that lobbying provides a public good by educating legislators about policy and the consequences of legislation. In this article, we link a proposed tax reform with a substantive disclosure requirement to promote the kind of “information subsidy” that serves the public interest, while mitigating – at least to some extent – the distortion that may result from the imbalance of financial resources on the business side and other institutional contraints identified in the literature. We argue that corporate lobbying should be encouraged – by allowing business …

Charities And Lobbying: Institutional Rights In The Wake Of Citizens United, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

One of the many aftershocks of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC is that the decision may raise constitutional questions for the long-standing limits on speech by charities. There has been much scholarly attention both before and after that decision on the limit for election-related speech by charities, but much less attention has been paid to the relating lobbying speech limit. This article seeks to close that gap by exploring that latter limit and its continued viability in the wake of Citizens United. I conclude that while Citizens United by itself does not undermine the limit …

Charities And Lobbying: Institutional Rights In The Wake Of Citizens United, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

One of the many aftershocks of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC is that the decision may raise constitutional questions for the long-standing limits on speech by charities. There has been much scholarly attention both before and after that decision on the limit for election-related speech by charities, but much less attention has been paid to the relating lobbying speech limit. This article seeks to close that gap by exploring that latter limit and its continued viability in the wake of Citizens United. I conclude that while Citizens United by itself does not undermine the limit …

Judicial Lobbying, Jonas Anderson

J. Jonas Anderson

Lobbying In The Shadows: Religious Interest Groups In The Legislative Process, Zoe D. Robinson

Zoe Robinson

Political Campaigning By Churches And Charities: Hazardous For 501(C)(3)S, Dangerous For Democracy, Donald B. Tobin

Donald B. Tobin

Nonprofit section 501(c)(3) organizations are prohibited from participating or intervening in an election on behalf of a candidate for public office. Despite this prohibition, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations have become increasingly active in political campaigns. Many organizations are either ignoring the political campaign ban or are using "issue discussion" or "lobbying" as a means of promoting candidates and testing the limits of the prohibition. Current scholarship surrounding the political campaign ban argues that the ban is either unconstitutional or inappropriate as a matter of public policy. This article argues that the ban is both meritorious and constitutional. It argues that taxpayer …

What Is This "Lobbying" That We Are So Worried About?, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Lobbying is both an essential part of our democratic process and a source of some of our greatest fears about dangers to that process. Yet when Congress, the public, and scholars consider loosening or, as is more often the case, tightening the restrictions on lobbying, they usually assume that everyone knows what activities are in fact lobbying. They therefore overlook the fact that multiple definitions of lobbying currently exist in the various federal laws addressing lobbying. This Article seeks to fill this gap by answering the question of how lobbying should be defined for purposes of the existing federal laws …

The Carbon Frame: Condensed Version, Kyle Herman

Dr. Kyle S. Herman

In Defense Of Taxpayer Funded Lobbying: Securing An Affirmative Right To Intergovernmental Communication, Andrew Emerson

Andrew Emerson

Recent budget gaps have driven local governments to increase their efforts to secure state and federal funding for priority projects. In reply, activists have advocated for legislative proposals that would deny municipal and county governments the right to use public funds for these purposes, arguing that taxpayer funded lobbying disfranchises individual citizens by spending tax dollars to promote spending that they oppose. Despite a long-term judicial trend that supports local governments’ right to use public funds to engage in lobbying activity, state police powers leave these entities vulnerable to activist-driven legislative initiatives. This paper argues that local governments should respond …

Danish Wind Energy Innovation, Kyle S. Herman

Dr. Kyle S. Herman

This article compares the exceptional Danish wind energy innovation system with the system employed by the US government. The underlying assumption about innovation systems in the US is that they are technologically driven, and past technological advances can be built upon leading to break-through innovations. However in Denmark, innovation was driven from citizens and relied on no break-through technologies, but rather a piecemeal process of collective, smaller innovations. For wind energy, this process was far more successful than the technologically driven innovation system in the US.