On June 24, the State Democracy Research Initiative’s faculty co-directors, Miriam Seifter and Rob Yablon, filed an amicus brief with six other legal scholars in Center for Arizona Policy, Inc. v. Arizona Secretary of State, a case before the Arizona Supreme Court. The case concerns whether Proposition 211—an initiative approved by Arizonans in 2022 requiring disclosure of major donors to so-called “dark money” political groups—violates the Arizona Constitution’s free speech guarantee.
The amicus urges the Arizona Supreme Court to affirm the lower courts and uphold the law. It argues that the Arizona Constitution’s text, structure, and history strongly support transparency in elections, and that, if anything, the state constitution calls for less rigorous judicial scrutiny of disclosure laws than the federal constitution. The brief highlights Arizona’s longstanding constitutional commitments to open and accountable democratic self-government. It also explains that the lower courts’ decisions find strong historical support in Arizona’s founding-era campaign laws and in the broad-based national movement for electoral transparency and accountability that drove law and policy when the Arizona Constitution was adopted in the early 20th century.
The other legal scholars who joined the brief are Richard Briffault (Columbia Law School), Michael S. Kang (Northwestern Pritzker School of Law), Justin Levitt (LMU Loyola Law School), Bertrall Ross (UC Berkeley School of Law), Joshua Sellers (University of Texas at Austin School of Law), and Robert F. Williams (Rutgers Law School).