Our Work

The State Democracy Research Initiative filed an amicus brief urging the Arizona Supreme court to uphold a voter-initiated statute requiring the disclosure of major donors to "dark money" political groups.

Wisconsin is no stranger to big-money, politically charged state Supreme Court elections, and this year’s race might end up being the most expensive and divisive yet. What’s unfolding in Wisconsin highlights the growing tension between the ideals of an independent elected judiciary and the realities of many modern judicial campaigns—a tension epitomized by Elon Musk’s decision to join the fray.

Every campaign season brings renewed attention to the amount of money influencing American politics, and who is spending it, and for what purposes. In particular, people are concerned about what is called “dark money.” The term sounds scary and raises the specter of shadowy people manipulating the nation’s politics. This piece unpacks what dark money is, what concerns it raises and what might be done to address it.

Election law is a dynamic and rapidly expanding field that generates enormous public interest. It is also of great practical importance to lawyers and law students, with increasing litigation and many controversial Supreme Court decisions, including Bush v. Gore, Citizens United v. FEC, and Shelby County v. Holder. This Nutshell provides a succinct and thorough description of the law governing elections, the right to vote, and the political process in the United States.

Amid ongoing concerns about foreign electoral interference and fake news, digital platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been rolling out new political advertising policies for the 2020 election cycle. These emergent policies address what sort of ads are permissible, who can run them, how particular audiences can be targeted, and what disclosures and disclaimers must be made. This Essay aims to draw attention to the rise of platform self-regulation of political advertising and to encourage inquiry into its implications.

Election campaigns have become the domain of a thriving industry of paid political service providers. While leading scholars in other fields regard the rise of the campaign industry as a defining feature of our nation's politics, the industry is strikingly absent from the legal literature. This Article seeks to bring the campaign industry into election law discourse and contends that doing so has important practical and theoretical payoffs.

Conventionally understood, campaign finance reform is a matter of public regulation. This Article seeks to shift campaign finance discourse toward private ordering. Because scholars and reformers have long focused on public regulation, they have largely overlooked possible private correctives. The Article maps that uncharted terrain, revealing an array of extra-legal mechanisms that at least somewhat constrain money’s electoral clout.

This Article challenges the prevailing, bifurcated approach to voting and spending law. Its central thesis is that the law's disparate treatment of voting and spending is unjustified. Voting and spending are, at bottom, two methods of participating in the electoral process. Conceiving of them as two aspects of a broader right to participate -- a right the Supreme Court recently articulated, but did not develop, in McCutcheon v. FEC -- offers a principled basis to harmonize voting and spending law and reorient election law discourse.