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Ann Southworth | Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending in America

Date
Date
Wednesday 13 November 2024, 17:00 - 18:00

Join us just eight days after the United States Presidential Election for this lecture by Professor Ann Southworth which is based on her new book "Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending in America" and discusses how the First Amendment became an obstacle to campaign finance regulation in the United States.

In this lecture, co-hosted by the Legal Professions Research Group and the Centre for Democratic Politics, Ann Southworth will explore the roles of lawyers, advocacy organisations and their patrons in the creation of the constitutional doctrine that now makes most campaign finance regulation vulnerable to First Amendment challenge.

Abstract

Americans across party lines believe that reducing the influence of big money in politics should be a top policy priority. But legislators are constrained in responding to these concerns by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions finding that campaign finance regulations violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Big Money Unleashed shows that the current impasse is the result of a long-term process involving many players. Naturally, the Supreme Court justices played critical roles—but so did the attorneys who hatched the theories necessary to support the legal doctrine, the legal advocacy groups that advanced those arguments, the wealthy patrons who financed these efforts, and the networks through which they coordinated strategy and held the Court accountable.

Drawing from interviews with 52 lawyers who participated in key cases, along with public records and archival materials, Southworth chronicles how these players borrowed a litigation strategy pioneered by the civil rights lawyers to dismantle racial segregation and used it to advance a very different type of cause. Claims about the meaning of the First Amendment that were novel when introduced decades ago are now firmly embedded in constitutional law. That law is a source of power for those with big money to wield in American elections and for the politicians who attract support from big money players.

About the speaker 

Ann Southworth is professor of law and co-director of the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. She teaches and writes on the legal profession, with an emphasis on cause lawyers and their organizations and networks. She has published numerous articles in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals and authored and co-authored several books, such as Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (U. Chicago Press, 2008) and Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending (U. Chicago Press, 2023).