Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
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Democratic Legitimacy Under Conditions of Severely Depressed Voter Turnout
Get PDFDue to the present pandemic, it seems increasingly likely that the 2020 general election in November will be held under conditions of unprecedented downward pressure on voter turnout. The possibility of severely depressed turnout for a highly consequentialpresidential election raises troubling questions of democratic legitimacy. Although voter turnout in the United States has historically been poor, low turnout is not usually thought to threaten the legitimacy of electoral processes when it results from voluntary abstention and is distributed unsystematically. Conversely, electoral legitimacy is often considered at risk when nonvoting is involuntary, especially when obstacles to voting fall systematically on specific populations. If turnout in November is unusually low but largely voluntary and unsystematic, then the risks to legitimacy should be low. If, however, nonvoting is both widespread and involuntary, and especially if obstacles to voting seem systematically directed at specific groups, conditions will be in place for a significant escalation of the threat. In particular, concerns of electoral legitimacy, which place in doubt only the authority of specific election winners to occupy the offices to which they have purportedly been elected, may ratchet up to much more profound concerns about regime legitimacy. Such concerns cast doubt on the continuing validity of popular consent to the entirety of the existing governmental regime
States of Uncertainty: The Origins of Law and Community in Three American Towns
Get PDFFrom Festschrift for Carol Greenhous
Matthew Steilen, The Place of Norms in Separating Power
Get PDFOne of the chief intellectual discoveries of the past four years has been the degree to which government rests on norms: on a shared sense of the proper way to go about the business of government. This is unsurprising for followers of the law and society movement, with which the Baldy Center is so closely associated. From the beginning, scholars of law and society have demonstrated the limits of formalism in explaining how the law actually works. One can think of the Trump presidency as finally demonstrating for the wider world of legal scholars, the essential role of shared understandings, legal culture, accepted practice, informal conventions, and customs in our separation of powers. The judge-made doctrine has changed only at the margins, and its major holdings remain intact, but the real meaning of separation of powers has been altered dramatically
David Westbrook and Mark Maguire discuss airport security and counterterrorism
Get PDFEpisode 3 of the podcast features David A. Westbrook, UB School of Law and Mark Maguire, National University of Ireland Maynooth. Professors Westbrook and Maguire discuss airport security and counterterrorism, and their new book, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge, 2020)
