Tonight Floyd Abrams gave the Raymond Pryke First Amendment Lecture at UCI Law, and you can watch a video of it here:

Most of the lecture consisted of Floyd defending the Supreme Court’s approach to campaign finance cases particularly in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United v. FEC. Having just written a book which examines some of Floyd’s arguments in detail, I found many of Floyd’s arguments familiar (well said, and interesting to the audience, but familiar to me). And in the Q&A I ask Floyd about the treatment of foreign money in elections.

But there was one part of the talk that was new to me and significant, and when I asked Floyd about it, he confirmed it was new. It comes near the end of the talk, when Floyd (around the 35 minute mark) says:

“Now in praising Buckley I don’t mean to denigrate the need for much greater attention to be played to the issue of equality with respect to elections as well as other topics. It’s not only a current political issue, but a moral one. But it is not to be solved, I would argue, or even addressed, by limiting speech. There are lots of non-First Amendment-threatening ways to seek to address the issue of equality generally or even ith respect to elections generally and other topics. The decision of the Supreme Court, holding unconstitutional a central part of the Voting Rights Act, for example, seems to me indefensible. The gerrymandering that has made elections to Congress in most districts so non-competitive that many find it irrelevant to vote is not only morally odious but raises legal issues that I hope someday the Supreme Court will sseriously address. Significantly increased voter identification requirements, limitations on times and places of voting, are at odds with what I think of as democratic norms. And I think we should have more public funding of elections and more disclosure of who spends what in elections. But limiting speech about elections is something else entirely.”

UPDATE: You can find Floyd’s prepared remarks here.