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

Join Professor Ann Southworth for a lecture on how the First Amendment became an obstacle to campaign finance regulation in the United States.

About the event 

Professor Ann Southworth, co-hosted by the Legal Professions Research Group and the Centre for Democratic Politics, will give a lecture based on her new book Big Money Unleashed The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending.

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. Her first book, Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (U. Chicago Press, 2008), is a group portrait of influential lawyers serving causes of the American political right – their backgrounds, strategies, and conflicting ideas and aspirations – as well as the mediator organizations that seek to foster cooperation among them. Her new book, Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending (U. Chicago Press, 2023), explores the roles of lawyers, advocacy organizations, and their patrons in the creation of the constitutional doctrine that now makes most campaign finance regulation vulnerable to First Amendment challenge. She is also the co-author of The Legal Profession: Ethics in Contemporary Practice (3d ed. forthcoming 2024), an interdisciplinary textbook on the American legal profession.

Before joining the founding faculty at UC Irvine Law School, Southworth was a visiting professor at Harvard and UCLA, a professor at Case Western Reserve, and an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation. Prior to entering academia, she clerked for a federal judge and practiced at Morrison & Foerster, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the US Department of Justice. She received her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford University.

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