Fourteenth Amendment

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.
Fourteenth Amendment Case Comment

Electing Judges, Judging Elections, and the Lessons of Caperton

Vol. 123 No. 1 Few Supreme Court cases inspire a bestselling novel before they’re decided. But Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. did: the story of how a big damages verdict prompted the head of a large corporation to pour millions of dollars into a judicial election for the court that would hear the company’s appeal inspired John Grisham just as it appalled the Court. Caperton calls to mind far more than the plot of a page-turner. This Comment shows how Caperton also taps into several long-running themes in the law of democracy – the set of doctrines and jurisprudential positions that create the structure within which politics, elections, and governance occur.