I’ve published what I’m sure will be a controversial essay in the Yale Law Journal Forum on the small-donor revolution in campaign financing.  Up until now, reformers have characterized this development in glowing, unqualified terms: as a way to “reclaim”… Continue reading

That’s the title of my “must read” piece of the day, written by Jonathan Rauch and Ray LaRaja and published here in The Atlantic. The subtitle is: “The major American parties have ceded unprecedented power to primary voters. It’s a… Continue reading

This Friday in D.C., former White House Counsels to Presidents Trump (Don McGahn) and Obama (Bob Bauer) will be jointly holding a public, keynote conversation as part of a George Mason Symposium titled “The Administration of Democracy.” Perhaps fittingly, the… Continue reading

In a NYT article today, John Schwartz accurately quotes me as expressing skepticism about whether various political reforms are likely to fundamentally transform the hyerpolarized politics of our era. I want to elaborate briefly on those comments, since John… Continue reading

Politico is running a piece called “99 Ways to Fix American Elections,” with brief suggestions from 99 commentators. One of the most original and intriguing comes from Elaine Kamarck, of the Brookings Institution: In our constitutional system, presidents don’t govern… Continue reading

That’s the title of an op-ed today in the NY Times, by David Shribram of McGill University, with the subtitle: “The campaign for prime minister just started. And it’s almost over.” The piece points out many ways in which Canadian… Continue reading

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump House Republicans should allow Chairs of Committees to remain for longer than 6 years. It forces great people, and real leaders, to leave after serving. The Dems have unlimited terms. While that has its own problems,… Continue reading

That’s what I called the assertions from Dr. Robert Epstein in his July testimony to a Senate committee. Epstein’s non-peer reviewed report and testimony have gotten much more attention in the last couple of days after President Trump tweeted about… Continue reading

Russians and campaign finance law. Manipulation of democracy through social media. The transformative role of small donors in campaigns. Partisan gerrymandering. Read, and teach, all about it through the 2019 Supplement to The Law of Democracy, now available here: https://3668083.app.netsuite.com/core/media/media.nl?id=3508202&c=3668083&h=6b593bcd626e97f26edb&_xt=.pdf

The Supreme Court has long recognized that laws regulating candidate access to the ballot implicate the First Amendment and associational rights of voters. After all, if a candidate cannot get on the ballot, voters cannot vote for that candidate. As… Continue reading

We are beginning to get little windows into the internal governmental process involved in the reversal-of-course on the Census issue. As expected, the DOJ lawyers concluded that the issue was over, because there was not enough time left to generate… Continue reading

Fred Gray, now 88 years old, is one of the major lawyers of the civil-rights movement, though my sense is he is less well-known nationally than he ought to be, perhaps because he has spent his life in Alabama. Randy… Continue reading

Michael Ramsey, one of the leading scholars/defenders of originalism, has a post on Rucho at The Originalism Blog that offers a distinct assessment of the decision. Critics of Rucho will like the first half of his analysis, but not the… Continue reading

Yesterday at the Balkinization blog, I put up this perspective on the Court’s Census decision. Here is a bit of that analysis: Today’s decision in the Census case is a powerful example of what I call an “institutionally realist” approach… Continue reading