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Election Administration Concerns Meet Claims of a Fraudulent Election: A Comprehensive Analysis of the 2020 Presidential Election and its Aftermath in Wisconsin
Get PDFThe 2020 presidential election unearthed valid questions about how the election was administered and whether various state laws were properly followed. However, President Donald Trump and his closest allies routinely fail to distinguish between questions about whether state officials correctly interpreted and applied the state’ s election code and actual fraud or malfeasance. There is a significant difference between accusing election officials of wrongly interpreting state law or incorrectly implementing election procedures, and alleging that those same officials intended to rig the outcome. Failure to make this distinction has contributed to the stolen election narrative, which continues to roil the American body politic. Since the 2020 election, the United States has seen the emergence of several alarming consequences which evidence the severe impact this narrative has had on the country’s democratic institutions. First, President Donald Trump’s contentions that he won the 2020 election and that the United States election system cannot be trusted have eroded public faith in the outcome of that election. Second, the United States has seen an influx of candidates running for office who show little allegiance to democratic norms. Although many of these candidates lost in the 2022 midterms, a significant number won, including for positions that oversee election administration. Third, claims of a fraudulent election system have birthed reform proposals that would fundamentally affect the way elections are administered, including proposals that would further expose election administration to partisanship. These trends give rise to legitimate concerns with respect to how elections will be administered in the future
Partisan Gerrymandering: The Promise and Limits of State Court Judicial Review
Get PDFIn 2021, the Oregon Legislature succeeded in redrawing the state’s legislative and congressional districts, but the new redistricting plans were immediately challenged in state court as partisan gerrymanders. The Oregon Supreme Court rejected the challenge to the state legislative map, but its analysis, which accorded significant deference to the legislature’s choices, raised more questions than answers about the appropriate level of scrutiny for state redistricting plans. A special, five-judge court likewise rejected the gerrymandering challenge to the congressional map, and, while its analysis was less deferential, its decision also left unanswered the fundamental question regarding at what point a redistricting plan becomes an impermissible gerrymander. Both decisions, then, highlight the difficulty for state courts to police partisan gerrymandering. This Article concludes by examining some of the reasons for the Oregon courts’ deferential approach to reviewing redistricting plans and offers several recommendations for future reform – recommendations that apply equally to other states whose redistricting process and legal framework governing redistricting share similarities with Oregon’s
Rights and Remedies: Rental Housing for Low-Income Households in the United States
Get PDFThe state of rental housing for low-income households in the United States is deplorable. Unaffordable, unsanitary, and insecure, this housing violates the internationally recognized right of housing. While the United States has never formally recognized that right, the right guarantees not only a roof overhead but also affordability, habitability, and security of tenure. Policies and programs seeking to remedy the problems in rental housing might consciously address these aspects of rental housing. Policies and programs of this sort will not be enough to eliminate all problems, but they would alleviate a matter of great embarrassment, namely, the most affluent country in the world does not adequately house low-income households
Checkmate: Why the First Amendment Protects Prison Inmates\u27 Right to Play Correspondence Chess Using Algebraic Notation
Get PDFInterconstituted Legal Agents
Get PDFLegal theory and doctrine depend on underlying assumptions about human nature and sociality. Perhaps the most common and basic assumption is that we are separate persons who communicate imperfectly with one another. While this separation thesis has been questioned, it still dominates legal theory. However, I show that understanding separation and connection as alternative perspectives, rather than as ontologically true or false, reveals that legal conflict often arises when these perspectives give rise to clashing intuitions concerning the meaning of community and what constitutes goals and harms. This Article organizes perspectives on social relationships in increasing order of intersubjectivity: isolation, interaction, interdependence, and interconstitution. The last of these, interconstitution, understands people as continuously becoming who they are on account of one another, not as separate agents who merely influence one another. Some theories of human developmental biology suggest that this perspective has as reasonable a claim, and perhaps a greater claim, on social reality as do the more familiar ones. I use several problems in law to demonstrate the importance of the choice among these perspectives, especially highlighting the valuable insights of interconstitutionalism
The Accident Network : A Network Theory Analysis of Proximate Causation
Get PDFIn torts, proximate causation, or legal cause, examines whether harmful negligent conduct is “closely enough related” to the damages that ensue. Torts professors often use the metaphor of a stone being thrown into a pond to explain this rather amorphous legal doctrine. The ripples the stone creates surrounding it are the direct result of the act of it being thrown. The stone tossed into the pond, i.e., a negligent act, created an effect which perpetuated via ripples to a long distance, forever changing the entire pond, i.e., causing close and far damages. Can all of those affected by the negligent act be compensated? Should they? It is up to proximate causation to determine if a ripple is too remote from the thrown stone to be viewed as its “direct” or “foreseeable” result. However, this does not provide the legal system with a lot of guidance. This is where network theory can be helpful
