By EUGENE VOLOKH
Smith is also the founder and chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics in Alexandria. Smith is the author of “Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform” (Princeton 2001) and co-author of the casebook “Voting Rights and Election Law” with Michael Dimino and Michael Solimine. The New York Times has called him “the “intellectual powerhouse [of the] campaign … to roll back Watergate-era campaign finance restrictions,” and his work has been cited repeatedly in Supreme Court opinions, as well as in lower court opinions.
In his new article, Smith argues that recent decisions by the Roberts Court striking down campaign finance restrictions and elements of government-funded campaign systems are welcome developments but, at least in the latter case, based on unsound legal theory. Smith argues that the court should move further, adopting a robust doctrine of “separation of campaign and state” akin to the separation of church and state or the separation of military and civilian authority that are not expressly in the Constitution, but have been adopted by the court through case by case adjudication of the Constitution’s express provisions.
