Introduction.

• Author: Sullivan, Kathleen M.

Voting is the lifeblood of democracy, and few issues in public law are as important as government regulation of the political process. The existence of our nation's elaborate, complex and highly technical "law of democracy" might seem at first glance to be a contradiction. Democracy, one might think, is prior to law, and it might seem that incumbent government officials cannot be trusted to regulate fairly the very means by which representatives are selected.

On closer reflection, however, it becomes clear that regulation of elections is inevitable in a constitutional democracy. In any democracy, the stakes in election law are high because the danger is always present that the "ins" will try to keep the "ins" in and the "outs" out, as the late, great constitutional scholar, and former Dean of Stanford Law School, John Hart Ely used to say. Regulation to ensure access to the voting booth and the integrity of electoral outcomes is thus an inevitable concomitant of having elections at all.

In a constitutional democracy, the difficulties are compounded by the guarantees of equal protection and freedom of speech. Current debates over the justiciability of partisan redistricting and the renewal of the Voting Rights Act (1) illustrate how lively controversy remains over how to ensure that voting power is distributed equally, without systematic entrenchment of some voters or effective disenfranchisement of others. Current debates over campaign finance regulation illustrate how lively controversy remains over how to ensure that candidates and their supporters can get out their messages and appeal to voters while maintaining a system of one person one vote rather than one dollar one vote.

This issue of the Stanford Law and Policy Review makes a significant and welcome contribution to these debates by exploring current issues in campaign finance regulation, voting rights and citizen participation. The articles in this issue exemplify the increasing sophistication of election law scholarship. While it has long been commonplace in private law scholarship to ask how well economic markets function and whether legal intervention is necessary to correct market failures (e.g., negative externalities, free rider problems, races to the bottom) or to encourage competition (e.g., by limiting monopoly power), legal literature that asks similar questions in the context of political markets is relatively new. True to the mission of this journal, the articles here ask these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining empirical observations about policy with normative insights about law.

Three of these articles make significant contributions to the debate over ongoing restrictions on campaign finance in the wake of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, (2) more commonly known as the "McCain-Feingold" legislation after its principal sponsors in the Senate, and new initiatives at the state level to limit campaign spending in state elections.

McCain-Feingold is...