[EL] And the best, most recent book on election law that I read was....

[Gerken, Heather]

I loved David Schultz’s email, and not just because I’m a long-time admirer of Jim Gardner’s.  It would be wonderful if members of the list drew each other’s attention to great new articles, especially those written by juniors.

I’ve got two nominees, but they both fall in the same category:  intellectual arbitrage.  Both young scholars have taken insights from election law and applied them to other fields.  In doing so, they’ve also managed to say something interesting about election law.  Because this work technically falls outside the ambit of election law, folks in our field might not have paid as much attention to the work.  But they should.

The first is Jessica Bulman-Pozen’s wonderful piece on “Partisan Federalism,” which came out this year in the Harvard Law Review.  Many of you may remember Larry Kramer’s great piece in the Columbia Law Review on the relationship between the political parties and federalism.  For a long time, his was the definitive article on the subject.  Jessica has refashioned Kramer’s argument in light of what we now know now about how the parties function.  She talks about something we already know – that the parties run their battles through the states – and finds all sorts of interesting things to say about issues at the core of our field.  The article touches on nitty-gritty doctrinal issues (like rules against out-of-state campaign contributions), but it also addresses more theoretical issues, like the puzzle of state based representation and the partisan-inflected nature of loyalty.

The second is just about anything David Schleicher has written on local government law during the last few years.  David has taken a host of insights from political science and used them to upend some of the conventional wisdoms in local government law.  He’s done more to explain why there’s no political competition in city races than a bevy of political scientists, and he’s now deploying the insights of our field to explain why a variety of administrative processes fail.  The work, in turn, tells us a good deal about the limits of elections, the nature of representation, and how the political processes we study work in context.  David’s work has forced me to rethink some of my basic assumptions about how representation works, and he’s had more ideas in the last few years than most of us have had in a decade.

-Heather

Heather K. Gerken
J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
New Haven CT  06511
203-432-8022 (ph)
203-432-8095 (fax)


From: <Schultz>, "David A." <dschultz at hamline.edu<mailto:dschultz at hamline.edu>>
Date: Tuesday, September 2, 2014 at 5:41 PM
To: "law-election at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:law-election at department-lists.uci.edu>" <Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu>>
Subject: [EL] And the best, most recent book on election law that I read was....


Hi all:

I want to acknowledge the best election law book that I have read in some time. It is James Gardner’s WHAT ARE CAMPAIGNS FOR?

Too often and too much of what goes on in the election law listserv is simply ego-driven self-promotion where we spend too much time promoting ourselves and our own scholarship, playing one-upmanship over another.  However, we forget that the field of election law is not only about law and policy but it is an intellectual endeavor where we should be trying to learn from one another.  Rarely do I see any of us acknowledging others, saying that we have actually read their scholarship and that we have grown from it or learned something that we have not seen.  Instead if other are read I see too much in this listserv seeking to find fault with others and show why they are wrong.  Or worse, in a field (election law) where most of the scholarship is law review driven, for those of us who write books it is disheartening that too few read them.  I am reminded of a book by Ben Barber (one of my teachers) who in STRONG DEMOCRACY said that American democracy is noisy and full of talk but few listen.  To have a real conversation we all need to listen to what others say and take heart and mind of what they say.

I say all of this because, as noted at the top of the e-mail, Gardner’s book is outstanding. Yes it is from 2009 but I finally read it and his arguments about deliberation, voting, and election law are really fascinating and worth reading.  He does a terrific job combining empirical political science with theory and law, something we need to do a better job as a discipline.

I think it would be nice if others on this listserv spent a few minutes or posted an e-mail indicating the best or most interesting book they have read about election law recently and acknowledge the author for his or her work.  Yes I sound polly anyish (?) but sometimes it is ok to give a shameless promotion for someone else besides yourself.

--
David Schultz, Professor
Editor, Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE)
Hamline University
Department of Political Science
1536 Hewitt Ave
MS B 1805
St. Paul, Minnesota 55104
651.523.2858 (voice)
651.523.3170 (fax)
http://davidschultz.efoliomn.com/
http://works.bepress.com/david_schultz/
http://schultzstake.blogspot.com/
Twitter:  @ProfDSchultz
My latest book:  Election Law and Democratic Theory, Ashgate Publishing
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754675433
FacultyRow SuperProfessor, 2012, 2013
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