Aligning Election Law
Aligning Election Law (Oxford University Press, 2024) (winner of the AALS Distinguished Scholarship in Election Law honorable mention) | Link
Alignment between governmental outputs and popular preferences is a core democratic value. For the people genuinely to rule, their government should heed their wishes. Yet alignment is not appreciated by election law scholarship, much of which focuses on other democratic goals. Nor do the courts consider alignment when deciding election law cases. Aligning Election Law fills this gap, providing a new theoretical perspective on election law and showing how alignment theory would operate in practice, in both litigation and legislation.
Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos examines alignment from a variety of angles, including its democratic value, its place in legal doctrine, its rarity in modern American politics, and its application to particular election law topics. The book also engages with issues facing American constitutional law and society, including voting restrictions, political parties, partisan gerrymandering, minority representation, and campaign finance, and how alignment theory would tackle these. The book’s orientation is normative, suggesting how judicial (and nonjudicial) institutions should approach electoral regulations, not how they have addressed them in the past.
By thoroughly canvassing the democratic theory, empirical political science, and election law literatures, the book argues that alignment should be a tenet of the law of democracy. Accordingly, Aligning Election Law will be valuable not just to scholars, students, and practitioners of election law, but to anyone wishing to understand how the law of democracy could better achieve the values of democracy.
Election Law: Cases and Materials
Election Law: Cases and Materials (Carolina Academic Press, 7th ed. 2021) (with Richard L. Hasen, Daniel H. Lowenstein, and Daniel P. Tokaji) | Link
The new student-friendly seventh edition of Election Law: Cases and Materials fully covers developments in election law through 2021, including extensive coverage of recent partisan and racial gerrymandering challenges; campaign finance cases in the Citizens United era; and challenges to new voter identification laws and other voting restrictions. It continues to include perspectives from law and political science, and it is appropriate in both law and political science courses. The extensive campaign finance coverage makes the book appropriate for a campaign finance seminar as well.
New material in this edition includes coverage of the Supreme Court’s most recent cases on the Voting Rights Act and vote denial (Brnovich), donor disclosure and the First Amendment (AFPF v. Bonta), campaign contributions (Thompson v. Hebdon), bribery (Kelly v. United States), and the Electoral College (Chiafalo v. Washington); discussion of controversies and litigation surrounding the 2020 election and COVID-19-related election administration changes; and a completely rewritten section on partisan gerrymandering, including an edited version of the Supreme Court’s June 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause.