Election Law Commons^™

Two Challenges For Campaign Finance Disclosure After Citizens United And Doe V. Reed, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Disclosure moved front and center on the campaign finance stage in 2010. Indeed, the year just passed witnessed the emergence of not one, but two significant challenges for our disclosure laws.

2010 began with new concerns about the burdens disclosure can place on the rights of political participation and association protected by the First Amendment, with the possibility that the Supreme Court – which had become increasingly skeptical about campaign finance regulation since Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito joined the Court – might impose new restrictions on disclosure.

Campaign Speech Law With A Twist: When The Government Is The Speaker, Not The Regulator, Helen Norton

Publications

Although government entities frequently engage in issue-related campaign speech on a variety of contested ballot and legislative measures, this fact has been entirely overlooked in contemporary First Amendment debates over campaign speech law specifically and government speech more generally. The Supreme Court's "campaign speech" and "government speech" dockets have focused to date on claims by private parties that the government has restricted or silenced their speech in violation of the First Amendment. In contrast, disputes over what this Article calls "governmental campaign speech" involve Free Speech Clause and other challenges by private parties who seek instead to silence the government's …

Elections In California, Karen Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.

What's In A Name?: Predictably Regulating Cyberfraud To Protect The Democratic Political Process, Whitney C. Boshers

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

In recent elections, political candidates have capitalized on the Internet as a central organizing resource. As a result of the low-cost, high-reward nature of campaign websites, some candidates have begun to register Web addresses--or domains--in opponents' names in order to disrupt the democratic political process. Engaging in a practice known as cyberfraud, these individuals register for domains containing the candidate's name, such as 'firstnamelastname.com." Then, instead of finding themselves on the candidate's official campaign website, voters access a website operated by the candidate's opponent that contains misleading or outright false information. Unfortunately, most political candidates have little recourse for such …

I Demand Proof That Trump’S Hair Is His Own — And American, Brandt Goldstein

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Citizens United And The Illusion Of Coherence, Richard L. Hasen

Michigan Law Review

The self-congratulatory tone of the majority and concurring opinions in last term's controversial Supreme Court blockbuster, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, extended beyond the trumpeting of an absolutist vision of the First Amendment that allows corporations to spend unlimited sums independently to support or oppose candidates for office. The triumphalism extended to the majority's view that it had imposed coherence on the unwieldy body of campaign finance jurisprudence by excising an "outlier" 1990 opinion, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which had upheld such corporate limits, and parts of a 2003 opinion, McConnell v. FEC, extending Austin to unions …

Racial Redistricting In A Post-Racial World, Gilda R. Daniels

All Faculty Scholarship

The 2011 redistricting will provide some interesting challenges for minority voting rights. How can we preserve minority electoral opportunities and gains in the wake of Bartlett v. Strickland and Georgia v. Ashcroft? What is the impact on future voting rights litigation and are coalition district claims viable as an opportunity to continue the electoral gains made since the passage of the Voting Rights Act? Are majority-minority districts safe from legislative backsliding? The Supreme Court's construed admonitions against race-conscious redistricting in recent cases may become cautionary tales. This Article discusses the central role the Voting Rights Act should play in preserving …

On Dejudicializing American Campaign Finance Law, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court dominates American campaign finance law. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission dramatically illustrates this basic truth, but Citizens United is nothing new. The Court has been the preeminent force in shaping and constraining our campaign finance laws since Buckley v. Valeo, and the Court's role as arbiter of what regulations may or may not be enforced only continues to grow. The President of the United States can wag his finger at the Court during the State of the Union Address and denounce its Citizens United ruling to the Justices' faces on national television, but even he …

Rational Coercion: Citizens United And A Modern Day Prisoner's Dilemma, Anne M. Tucker

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

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

Journal Articles

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 …

Public Funding Of Judicial Campaigns: The North Carolina Experience And The Activism Of The Supreme Court, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the problem of selecting judges to sit on the highest state courts has become a national crisis. North Carolina remains among the states whose constitutions require competitive elections of all its judges. Presently, all candidates for its judicial offices must first compete for election in a non-partisan primary, a system motivated by the desire to maximize the power of the state’s citizen-voters to choose their judges and hold them accountable for their fidelity to the law. Some observers have continued to celebrate such judicial elections as an honorable democratic empowerment, while others have not. The disagreement has …

Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting The Research On Campaign Spending And Citizen Initiatives, John M. De Figueiredo, Chang Ho Ji, Thad Kousser

Faculty Scholarship

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have …