Academic Round-Up

Rick Hasen (Loyola Law School-Los Angeles) has posted “Beyond Incoherence: The Roberts Court’s Deregulatory Turn in FEC v. Wisconsin Right of Life” on SSRN, see here. Rick is one of the most knowledgeable election law scholars out there, and has an excellent blog on election law at this site. In this Article, Rick examines the deregulatory turn taken by the Court in FEC v. Wisconsin RIght of Life, and compares the Court’s new approach with its prior “New Deference” approach. He argues that the Court’s new approach is just as incoherent as its old approach, and in a common theme in the academy after this past Term, that Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts sub silentio overruled the Court’s former approach. In Part III, the Article looks forward to future election law challenges, and evaluates how the Roberts Court (and lower courts) might deal with them.

Songying Fang, Tim Johnson, and Jason Roberts (all of the University of Minnesota Political Science Department) have posted “Will of the Minority: Rule of Four on the United States Supreme Court” on SSRN, see here. This is an interesting paper as the authors examine the Court’s famous “Rule of Four” used in the evaluation of petitions of certiorari, and use a game-theoretic approach to analyze under what circumstances the “Rule of Four” will be invoked by the Court. They then use empirical data from 1953 to 1985 to assess the validity of their model and to shape several conclusions about the certiorari process. This is a good paper, but there is quite a bit of mathematics in this paper and thus those without a quantitative background may find it difficult to read.