That We Are Underlings: The Real Problems in Disciplining Political Spending and the First Amendment
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2014
Abstract
We’re gathered at the intersection of professional reason and popular passion. The roughly two-thirds of Americans who have said they strongly oppose Citizens United don’t have a theory of the First Amendment; they have a felt sense that the decision is an emblem of the political condition that unites Tea Partiers, Occupiers, and the Warren wing of the Democratic Party in shared disgust: the superior political influence and access of big business and great fortunes. This is the condition, or a subset of the condition, that Larry Lessig and Zephyr Teachout call corruption rightly understood: structural corruption that tethers the attention and loyalty of officials to the concerns of their financial patrons.
Disciplines
Constitutional Law | First Amendment | Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Jedediah S. Purdy,
That We Are Underlings: The Real Problems in Disciplining Political Spending and the First Amendment,
30
Const. Comment.
391
(2014).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3242