Listen to NPR’s On Point: It’s been 10 years since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Citizens United. We’ll look back at the last decade and take stock of the fallout. Guests Carrie Levine, senior reporter at the Center for … Continue reading
Category Archives: Supreme Court
Brendan Fischer for Slate. … Continue reading
Abby Wood for The Monkey Cage. … Continue reading
Reupping this Slate piece of mine that ran in December, on what the opinion has meant in the last decade: In 2010, the largest reported individual contributors to federal campaigns in American politics were Robert and Doylene Perry, owners of … Continue reading
Brad Smith WSJ oped. … Continue reading
Covered on the Business Scholarship Podcast. … Continue reading
Video: ACS held a panel discussion on the state of campaign finance on January 16, 2020. Titled “Revisiting Campaign Finance Regulation 10 Years After Citizens United,” the event featured Jason Abel, Lee Goodman, Chisun Lee, and Ciara Torres-Spelliscy and was moderated by Michael Tomasky. A decade after the … Continue reading
Scott Blackburn analysis for IFS. … Continue reading
From the Center for Responsive Politics: A secretive network spending millions of dollars to confirm President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court picks terminated multiple 501(c)(4) nonprofit nodes last year while funneling money to an even more opaque limited-liability company, further obscuring the network’s funding … Continue reading
WLF: What is the judicial role? Are judges mere umpires who call balls and strikes based solely on rules made by others? Or are judges lawmakers in their own right, creating laws and making public policy? The U.S. Supreme Court … Continue reading
I have written this piece for Slate, part of their coverage of the end of the decade. It begins: In 2010, the largest reported individual contributors to federal campaigns in American politics were Robert and Doylene Perry, owners of Perry … Continue reading
Read the cert. petition in National Association for Gun Rights v. Mangan. … Continue reading
NYT reports. My earlier coverage is here. … Continue reading
I’ve been keeping my eye on Thompson v. Hebdon v. Hebdon for a long time. In this case, leading Supreme Court attorney Paul Clement filed a petition for the Supreme Court to take a case challenging Alaska’s campaign contribution limits … Continue reading
Supreme Court takes no action yet again on major campaign finance petition. Court could eventually grant, or, perhaps at this point more likely now would be either some kind of summary action or a dissent from denial of cert. from … Continue reading
The San Francisco Review of Book’s Joseph Cotto interviewed me about my book on Justice Scalia’s jurisprudence and legacy. Watch: … Continue reading
Read it here. … Continue reading
As early as Friday, the Supreme Court could announce it will hear a case that could put the nail into coffin of limits on campaign contributions to candidates. Here’s my preview in The Atlantic from last summer about this Paul … Continue reading
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy column. … Continue reading
Slate: “For the first time ever,” Justice Elena Kagan declared on June 27, “this court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.”Kagan was reading a summary of her dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause, … Continue reading
Interesting: Mr. Buttigieg criticized Ms. Warren and Beto O’Rourke for being too extreme on health care and guns at last week’s Democratic debate, and now he’s changing on the issue that ignited his unlikely candidacy. In an interview with Cosmopolitan, … Continue reading
Pete Williams: The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a challenge to maps drawn by Republicans for state legislative and congressional district boundaries in Michigan.The decision, which allows the GOP districts to stand, was expected because the court declared in … Continue reading
Justin Levitt deftly explains the importance of last term’s census case in the ACS Supreme Court Review. … Continue reading
The New Guy Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer piece in the ACS Supreme Court Review pulls no punches.: Rucho is not an easy case to take seriously as doctrine. Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion is more redolent of a debater’s brief than a … Continue reading
Adam Liptak NYT Sidebar: The court will decide whether to hear the case, Carney v. Adams, No. 19-309, sometime this fall.Delaware’s Constitution says that judges affiliated with any one political party can make up no more than a “bare majority” on … Continue reading
Joan confirms what many of us suspected from reading the opinions in Dep’t of Commerce v. NY: Chief Justice John Roberts cast the deciding vote against President Donald Trump’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, but only after … Continue reading
Reuters: The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a libertarian nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, filed a petition this week at the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to review a 2018 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would require … Continue reading
Logan Struther and Shana Kushner Gadarian have posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract: We examine the role that mass perceptions of the Supreme Court’s institutional nature—particularly how “political” it is—plays in assessments of its legitimacy. In a … Continue reading
Watch here: The Atlantic article is: Unlimited Donations to Candidates, Coming Soon? … Continue reading
I have written this piece for The Atlantic. It begins: During the George W. Bush administration, then–Solicitor General Paul Clement successfully defended the constitutionality of the 2002 McCain-Feingold law, which tightened electioneering and fundraising regulations. Can Clement now get traction … Continue reading
Chock full of election-law goodies. Among other pieces: Elizabeth Warren, Foreword (on corruption and faith in government)Jeffrey Clements, “But It Will Happen”: A Constitutional Amendment to Secure Political Equality in Election Spending and RepresentationViki Harrison, How One State Legislature Grappled … Continue reading
President Trump’s Speech this afternoon in which he said that the Administration would give up on efforts to add a citizenship question to the census is a victory for the rule of law. Many people were predicting that Trump would … Continue reading
I’m seeing a lot of hyperventilating on Twitter and elsewhere about how President Trump is about to start a constitutional crisis through an executive order that would mandate inclusion of the citizenship question on the census. If Trump actually ordered … Continue reading
Here, at the Public Discourse. … Continue reading
Joey Fishkin: So that leaves what I’d call the Evenwel Gambit: fess up, selectively, to Real Reason 2. Claim that you want to add the citizenship question to the Census in order to enable the CVAP-based drawing of district lines … Continue reading
I thought I’d pull together some thoughts on the issue of whether the Trump Administration will try again to add a citizenship question to the census, after sharing some earlier thoughts across this blog, to NPR, and at Slate. The … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Rebecca Green, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: The Rucho decision is hard to get your head around. Plaintiffs presented two clean cases with clear “smoking guns”: partisan gerrymanders in which legislators … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Moon Duchin, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Justice Kagan’s dissent in Rucho states in its opening paragraphs: “The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country, including those below, have … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Guy Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: One would be hard-pressed to find a more hackneyed Supreme Court opinion than Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion in Rucho. It … Continue reading
Washington Post: Trump was furious and thought the Commerce Department and the Justice Department — which has been arguing the case — had given up the fight too easily. He complained about Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.,who he said … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Michael Morley, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Rucho v. Common Causepresents competing judicial conceptions of American voters. Justice Kagan’s dissent encourages courts to employ … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Mike Parsons, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: In holding that partisan gerrymandering claims are not “resolvable according to legal principles” and are “therefore beyond [federal] courts’ jurisdiction,” Chief Justice … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Justin Levitt, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Last Thursday’s Rucho majority opinion brought many indignities. The shadowboxing with strawmen, in the form of proportionality claims no litigant put forward. The … Continue reading
Linda in the NYT: But first, the census case. I’ve been obsessed with imagining whatever dark night of the soul preceded the chief justice’s last-minute decision to shift course and reject the administration’s position.I readily admit that I have no … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Rick Pildes, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Now that the Supreme Court’s decision means that limits on partisan gerrymandering will have to come from venues such as Independent Redistricting Commissions (IRC) … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Keith Gaddie, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: Felix Frankfurter called redistricting a “political thicket” which the federal courts would do well to avoid. And, when the court did dive into … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Wendy Tam Cho, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: We have been focused for some time on the Supreme Court’s role in regulating partisan gerrymandering. Now that we know the Supreme Court … Continue reading
It is undeniably good news that the Trump Administration decided to abandon the citizenship question in the face of evidence that it would depress turnout especially among those with noncitizens in a household and in light of the Supreme Court’s … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Sam Issacharoff, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: The 33-year search for judicial standards in partisan gerrymandering cases came to a crashing conclusion this Term. As Justice Kagan noted in … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Franita Tolson, part of the symposium on Partisan Gerrymandering after Rucho: In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court held that a partisan gerrymandering claim presented a nonjusticiable political question because of the lack of … Continue reading