Democracy by the People Reforming Campaign Finance in America

Thanks to a series of recent US Supreme Court decisions, corporations can now spend unlimited sums to influence elections, Super PACs and dark money groups are flourishing, and wealthy individuals and special interests increasingly dominate American politics. Despite the overwhelming support of Americans to fix this broken system, serious efforts at reform have languished. Campaign finance is a highly intricate and complex area of the law, and the current system favors the incumbent politicians who oversee it. This illuminating book takes these hard realities as a starting point and offers realistic solutions to reform campaign finance. With contributions from more than a dozen leading scholars of election law, it should be read by anyone interested in reclaiming the promise of American democracy.

Introduction: democracy by the wealthy: campaign finance reform as the issue of our time Timothy K. Kuhner and Eugene D. Mazo; Part I. Defining the Problem: 1. The third coming of American plutocracy: what campaign finance reformers are up against Timothy K. Kuhner; 2. Liberty, equality, bribery, and self-government: reframing the campaign finance debate Deborah Hellman; 3. Aligning campaign finance law Nicholas Stephanopoulos; Part II. Proposed Solutions: 4. Reforming campaign finance reform: the future of public funding Richard Briffault; 5. Raising all of our voices for democracy: a hybrid public funding proposal Adam Lioz; 6. Reorienting disclosure debates in a post-Citizens United world Katherine Shaw; 7. Beyond repair: FEC reform and deadlock deference Daniel P. Tokaji; 8. The People's Pledge: campaign finance reform without legal reform Ganesh Sitaraman; 9. Super PAC insurance: a private sector solution to reform campaign finance Nick Warshaw; 10. Constraining and channeling corporate political power in Trump's America Kent Greenfield; 11. Reforming lobbying Maggie McKinley; 12. Regulating campaign finance through legislative recusal rules Eugene D. Mazo; 13. Contributions and corruption: restoring aggregate limits in the States Michael D. Gilbert; 14. Developing better empirical evidence for future campaign finance cases Brent Ferguson and Chisun Lee; 15. Fixing the Supreme Court's mistake: the case for the twenty-eighth Amendment Ronald A. Fein; Part III. Inspiration from Abroad: 16. The repudiation of Buckley v. Valeo K. D. Ewing; 17. Equal participation and campaign finance Yasmin Dawood; 18. Political finance and political equality: lessons from Europe Óscar Sánchez Muñoz.

Eugene D. Mazo is Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He is the editor of Election Law Stories (2016), a book that tells the history of the thirteen most important Supreme Court cases in election law. He serves as treasurer of the Section on Election Law and on the executive committee of the Section on Constitutional Law at the Association of American Law Schools. Mazo has taught at the law schools of the University of Baltimore, George Mason University, Virginia, the University of Maryland, and Wake Forest University, North Carolina. A graduate of Columbia College, Missouri, he holds a master's degree from Harvard University, Massachusetts, a doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford, and a law degree from Stanford University, California.
Timothy K. Kuhner is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Auckland. He is the author of Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution (2014), a book that received acclaim from Thomas Piketty, Lawrence Lessig, Erwin Chemerinsky, the Harvard Law Review, and the Law and Politics Book Review. Kuhner was previously Associate Professor of Law at the Georgia State University College of Law, a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Barcelona, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Latin America. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College, Maine and holds a J.D. and an LL.M. from Duke Law School, North Carolina.