Samuel Issacharoff Samuel Issacharoff is the Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. His research deals with issues in civil procedure (especially complex litigation and class actions), law and economics, constitutional law (particularly with regard to voting rights and electoral systems) and employment law. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process and one of the co-authors of the seminal Law of Democracy casebook. His work on procedure includes serving as the reporter for the Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation project at the American Law Institute. Professor Issacharoff is a 1983 graduate of the Yale Law School. After clerking , he spent the early part of his career as a voting rights lawyer. He then began his teaching career at the University of Texas in 1989, where he held the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law. In 1999, he moved to Columbia University School of Law, where he was the Harold R. Medina Professor of Procedural Jurisprudence, before joining the NYU faculty in 2005. He is the author of more than 100 books, articles and other academic works. Professor Issacharoff is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Supreme Court and Freedom of Speech…or is it $peech?

A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court heard, for the second time, arguments in a case about campaign finance. Constitutional law expert and New York University law professor Samuel Issacharoff, a Roosevelt Institute Braintruster, explains why a case that is peripheral to the central regulation of campaign funding nonetheless has the potential to answer the big electoral question – Is money speech, and who is allowed to have how much of it?

“Hillary: The Movie” is a peculiar vehicle for a major challenge to federal campaign finance law. This is not the 30-second attack ad, forced into the nation’s living rooms…

Competition: The missing ingredient of American democracy

Our system of checks and balances is off, and as a result, we find ourselves in fiscal and military quagmires. How can we fix the system and get our political institutions–in healthy competition– back on track?

Our recent history is unfortunately one that suggests little praiseworthy about government action. We need begin only with the disclosures of torture memos, the disastrous lack of regulation of new financial products, or the (at best) uncertain foreign military interventions. All seem to point to governmental incompetence or worse. But something else links them. The link is in fact an absence: the missing half of…