This year ISPS is hosting a series of workshops given by visiting professor and former Senator of Wisconsin, Russ Feingold. The spring workshop will examine the challenge of reforming electoral institutions in the United States. The workshop will meet six times during the semester for up to an hour and a half. The first workshop will be 4:30-6:00 pm on Wednesday, January 31 with subsequent sessions tentatively scheduled every two weeks (Registration is required). Students will be expected to volunteer to help select readings and lead the discussion on at least one topic.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY
This workshop focuses on the repairing the damage done to several key democratic institutions over the past decade. These include the right to vote, the regulation of campaign financing, and the presidential election process. For much of American history, these institutions were viewed as bi-partisan or non-partisan in nature. Yet with the advent of the Citizens United decision, the growing influence of wealthy political funders such as the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party movement, and now the Presidency of Donald Trump, these institutions have been politicized or compromised beyond recognition. This workshop explores how this damage might be repaired with an emphasis on current state and local initiatives and activism and, where appropriate, with special focus on Connecticut. The initial seminar will explore “how we got here” by focusing on the barriers to federal reform of these institutions in the current political climate. The next two sessions will focus on efforts to counter the varied attacks on the right to vote from gerrymandering to felony voting laws. The following two sessions will explore means for state and local campaign finance reform including studying Connecticut’s recent and bold public financing system. The sixth and final session will look at the effort to reform the Electoral College through the National Popular Vote Initiative with special focus on the extensive activism to get Connecticut to join the proposed Compact.
Russell Feingold is a Visiting Lecturer in Law and Martin R. Flug Visiting Professor in the Practice of Law at Yale Law School. He served as a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1993 to 2011 and a Wisconsin State Senator from 1983 to 1993. From 2013 to 2015, he served as the United States Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region of Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In addition to his congressional and diplomatic career, Senator Feingold has taught or lectured at Stanford University and Stanford University Law School, Lawrence University, Marquette University Law School, American University, and Beloit College. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian. Senator Feingold holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.