•  
  •  
 

Authors

Anna V. Stearns

Abstract

After more than a decade of judicial intervention and legislative reforms, North Carolina's campaign finance laws resemble a crazy quilt - a patchwork of provisions pieced together from remnants and scraps. The law is a dizzying array of proscriptions, requirements, and exceptions, sometimes based on speaker identity and sometimes based on the content or context of the political message. This quilt is what remained after the Fourth Circuit's strained and confusing decision in North Carolina Right to Life, Inc. v. Leake, decided in 2008, immediately following the Supreme Court's landmark decision in McConnell v. FEC. This Comment evaluates and summarizes North Carolina's existing campaign finance regulations, provides a critical analysis of both the state of the law and of the Fourth Circuit's decision in North Carolina Right to Life, Inc. v. Leake, and offers a suggested analytical framework for future judicial review of campaign finance regulations.

Included in

Election Law Commons

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.