Citizens United & the Amendment Process
Martin D Carcieri
July 28, 2013
Citizens United v. FEC (2010) may be the most infamous Supreme Court ruling of the past decade. In this case, the Court struck down two provisions of federal law which limited corporate and union expenditures to advocate the election or defeat of candidates for federal office, holding that the provisions violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. Martin Carcieri will explain that although this ruling rests firmly on earlier Court rulings, not only is an amendment to the U.S. Constitution invalidating Citizens United the most likely amendment that could be ratified in the next ten or twenty years, but also that such a recalibration of the balance between private and public power would be a highly appropriate use of the amendment process of Article V of the Constitution. To learn more before the presentation on Sunday, you can read the Handout.
Martin Carcieri is an Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, where he teaches courses and seminars on Constitutional Law and Political Theory. He holds a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, and has published twenty-five journal articles and book chapters. He is a long time humanist, skeptic, and rationalist.