About the Book

Democracy by the People: Reforming Campaign Finance in America

In April 2016, Free Speech For People co-hosted a symposium at Seton Hall School of Law featuring scholars and activists from across the country to help develop new thinking and proposed solutions for overhauling our nation’s campaign finance system. Justice Cheri Beasley, of the North Carolina Supreme Court, delivered the keynote address.

 

The ideas presented at that symposium led to a book, edited by Professors Eugene Mazo and Timothy Kuhner, Democracy by the People: Reforming Campaign Finance in America, now out from Cambridge University Press (for a 20% discount, enter the code MAZO2018). Each chapter contributes a different idea for addressing the problems of money in politics.

 

Read a Chapter

You can read a complimentary copy here of our Legal Director Ron Fein’s chapter: Fixing the Supreme Court’s Mistake: The Case for the Twenty-Eighth Amendment. This chapter explains why we need to overturn the Supreme Court’s constitutional precedent, how a constitutional amendment would work, how courts would analyze campaign finance laws after the amendment, and how we can come together to pass the amendment. As the chapter concludes:

Will passing a constitutional amendment be easy? Of course not—the process was intended to be hard. But in these turbulent times, with widespread public unhappiness with the influence of big money in politics and broad grassroots support, and with a President Trump-appointed Supreme Court unlikely to reverse Citizens United (let alone Buckley) any time soon, the pieces are coming together. With a determined “citizen uprising,” the Twenty- Eighth Amendment could become part of our Constitution before Buckley turns 50.

We hope you enjoy the chapter and the book!

Click here to read a chapter of the book.