Author

Lawrence Lessig

Election Law Case Comment

What Everybody Knows and What Too Few Accept

Vol. 123 No. 1 No one believes that every campaign contribution would tend to corrupt the judicial process. If campaigns were cheap, if contributions were small, if contributors were many or unknown – in any of those cases, the fact that money was contributed to a judge’s campaign could not lead anyone reasonably to believe that the contribution would effect any particular result. In these cases, money would be benign, and the raising of money in these cases should not undermine trust in the institution of the judiciary, at least for any reasonable soul.