This morning the Supreme Court decided two campaign finance cases consolidated under Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett. Writing for a narrow but familiar 5-4 majority—which included Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito—Chief Justice John Roberts overruled the Ninth Circuit and struck
In a Guest Commentary piece in the Detroit Free Press, former Supreme Court Justice O'Connor argued against processes in which state judges participate in competitive elections in order to secure spots on the state bench. In her own words: "Proponents of judicial elections argue that this
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division came under fire during the Bush Administration for stacking attorney positions with conservative lawyers with little civil rights experience. Now, the Civil Rights Division is coming under fire for doing just the opposite – hiring lawyers with civil rights
The National Institute on Money in State Politics published a report this week that breaks down over a quarter-million dollars in campaign contributions received by Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller from the finance, insurance, and real estate industries. The large sum is striking because Miller
Dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine, Erwin Cherminsky, and associate professor of law at Hofstra, James J. Sample, published an Op Ed piece in the New York Times yesterday arguing that the Supreme Court should limit campaign contributions in judicial
Just weeks after Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin pushed through his plan to cut off the collective bargaining rights of state employees, Wisconsin voters went to the polls to elect a replacement for Governor Walker as the Milwaukee County Executive and a state Supreme Court
The Supreme Court recently heard a pair of challenges to an Arizona law that provides public financing for candidates who agree to forgo private contributions. In a recent NY Times editorial, Harvard Law School Professor Fried argues that while it might appear that the court,
Today the Supreme Court hears the most recent campaign-finance challenge, the first since ruling in 2010's Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee that unions and corporations are not limited in the amount they are permitted to spend in promoting candidates in political races. This time,
Just over two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Caperton v. Massey, a case involving the ramifications of soaring campaign expenditures in state judicial elections. Caperton arose out of a West Virginia supreme court justice’s failure to recuse himself from a
As usual when right-wing politicians want to block a strongly Democratic voting bloc from exercising their right to vote, Republicans in New Hampshire and elsewhere are trotting out the tired excuse of preventing fraud to support new bills that will curtail the ability of students,