Professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy assesses the Roberts Supreme Court’s definition of corruption
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy wrote Deregulating Corruption for the Harvard Law & Policy Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2019.
According to the abstract
The Roberts Supreme Court has, or to be more precise the five most conservative members of the Roberts Court have, spent the last twelve years branding and rebranding the meaning of the word “corruption” both in campaign finance cases and in certain white-collar criminal cases. Not only are the Roberts Court conservatives doing this over the strenuous objections of their more liberal colleagues, they are also breaking with the Rehnquist Court’s more expansive definition of corruption.
The actions of the Roberts Court in defining corruption to mean less and less have been a welcome development among dishonest politicians. In criminal prosecutions, politicians convicted of honest services fraud and other crimes are all too eager to argue to courts that their convictions should be overturned in light of the Supreme Court’s lax definition of corruption. In some cases, jury convictions have been set aside for politicians who cite the Supreme Court’s latest campaign finance and white-collar crime cases, especially Citizens United v. FEC and McDonnell v. United States.
This Article explores what the Supreme Court has done to rebrand corruption, as well as how this impacts the criminal prosecutions of corrupt elected officials. This Article is the basis of a chapter of Professor Torres-Spelliscy’s second book, Political Brands, which was published by Edward Elgar Publishing in late 2019.
About Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy is a professor teaching courses in Election Law, Corporate Governance, Business Entities, and Constitutional Law. Prior to joining Stetson’s faculty, Professor Torres-Spelliscy was counsel in the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
Post date: Feb. 18, 2020
Media contact: Kate Bradshaw
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