The 3 Billion Dollar Election – Money, Speech & The Future of Campaign Finance

Friday, October 26th, 2012

Johnson Chapel

Amherst College, Amherst MA

Over the last several decades and with the advent of Citizens United and “Super-PACs,” our elections have become dependent upon increasingly large private donations from corporations, unions and individuals. The nature of campaign finance directly influences the character of the American republic. Some fear that this money has redefined the character of our government, while others see it as an extension of our rights as citizens.

Panelists are: Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and author of the author of Republic, Lost; John Samples, director of Cato’s Center for Representative Government, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University (Cato Institute) and the author of The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History and The Fallacy of Campaign Finance Reform; Ilya Somin ’95, professor of law at George Mason University, a widely published author in both the scholarly and popular press and a prominent blogger; and John Médaille, the author of Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective and The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace, and the editor of Economia Libertăţii: Renaşterea României Profund.

Nick Bruce ’15E of the Amherst Economic Forum is the moderator. Presented by the Amherst Political Union and the Amherst Economic Forum.