WIL is delighted to welcome first-time guest speaker Ann Southworth to discuss how the flood of big money into our elections has changed the political landscape and contributed to our current political crisis
Citizens United and other campaign finance rulings by the Roberts Court have dramatically changed elections in the US. These rulings are the result of a decades-long campaign to deregulate election spending in the name of free speech.
Guest speaker Ann Southworth, Irvine School of Law Professor and author of “Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending,” will tell us about her research into how lawyers, advocacy organizations, and their political and financial patrons helped to make the First Amendment law that stands in the way of campaign finance regulation.
Drawing from the interviews she conducted with lawyers on both sides of the fight, she will describe the campaign and some of its consequences. She will also discuss how these developments relate to the current political crisis.
Ann teaches and writes on the legal profession and lawyers. She is Co-Director of the UCI Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession and has a joint appointment in UCI’s Criminology Department. Prior to joining the founding faculty at UCI Law, she was a law professor at Case Western Reserve and an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation. She has also been a visiting professor at Harvard and UCLA.