Robust Election Law Conference Showcases Student Skills
Erica Jaffe, ’15, had spent months organizing and asking and emailing.
And when the Biggest Moment of the Big Day finally arrived — when influential legal scholar Cass Sunstein was preparing to deliver a keynote address at the election law conference she had managed — there weren’t enough seats in the house.
That’s when Jaffe knew that she and her Legal Forum colleagues had truly delivered. 
The student-run symposium, which provides the material for the journal’s annual volume, had landed 16 of the nation’s top election law scholars, sparked robust debate on a broad array of issues, and given a standing-room-only crowd the chance to hear Sunstein explain the ways in which party prejudice had become more entrenched than racism.
“I've attended a bunch of election law symposia, and I thought the Legal Forum's was the best of the lot,” said Assistant Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who helped the students connect with many of the panelists. “The event was impeccably organized, with a terrific roster of speakers, panels that made good substantive sense, and excellent engagement by all of the participants. At first, I thought the journal might have been too ambitious in trying to cover all of election law instead of a particular subfield. But the breadth of coverage turned out to be a major strength. The papers and presentations were more diverse as a result, and there was great cross-fertilization among election law's different areas.”
A 32-year tradition, the symposium does more than provide papers for the Law School’s second-oldest journal. It gives students a chance to take their Law School connections, action skills, and intellectual chops out for a spin, putting them in front of top legal scholars and at the helm of a Law School conference. As the journal’s symposium editor, Jaffe spearheaded management of this year’s event, working with Editor-in-Chief Viviana Aldous, ’15; Dean Michael Schill; and Stephanopoulos to recruit a panel of heavy-hitting contributors.
All of their panelists came from their top-choice wish list.
“These were the people who were the ‘aspirational gets’ for us,” Jaffe said. “We normally have 12 contributors, but this year we have 16. They all came from our first round.”
Conference preparations started last spring, with Aldous leading the board as it thoroughly researched potential topics. Election law — and whether it serves the electorate — emerged as a clear choice because it is meaty, durable, and of-the-moment, Aldous said.
“The symposium was just a few days after the midterm elections, and it’s also a time when people are starting to think about the 2016 election,” Aldous said. “And in the legal realm, it's timely, too. There are, and recently have been, so many cases before the Supreme Court that relate to voters on issues such as redistricting, voter ID laws, and campaign finance.”
During four panel discussions, participants explored a variety of perspectives on issues ranging from the polarized electorate to the role of election law. David A. Strauss, the Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law, talked about campaign finance. Stephanopoulos discussed the Arizona redistricting case being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court and introduced a new gerrymandering metric called the efficiency gap that he and a co-author proposed in a recent paper.
Sunstein, a former Law School professor who has worked at the White House and now teaches at Harvard Law School, addressed partyism in his keynote, suggesting, as he has in the past, that political prejudice in this country has eclipsed racism in many ways.
“Partyism has serious consequences for both politics and daily life,” said Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard.
He cited several powerful examples of growing political prejudice, including data showing that parents today are far more likely to be “displeased, upset, or unhappy” by their children marrying people of the opposite party. In 1960, the number of parents who would be unhappy with a mixed-party marriage was close to zero, he said. In 2008, it jumped to 20 percent. But in 2010, nearly half of Republicans said they’d be displeased if their children married Democrats, and about a third of Democrats said they’d be displeased if their children married Republicans.
He also noted that Americans today are more likely to favor party over policy — falling in lockstep if they know where party leaders stand on an issue, but sharing less predictable views if they don’t. More alarmingly: When errors are corrected — for instance, finding that Iraq did not, in fact, have weapons of mass destruction — people of the party whose version has been corrected not only tend not to alter their beliefs, they believe the first version more strongly.
“This is very destructive to democratic debate,” Sunstein said.
Jaffe said the talk — particularly the marriage data — gave her “serious pause.”
“If we as a nation say, ‘I refuse to accept my child marrying someone of a different political party,’ what does that mean in terms of tolerance and respect and actual discourse and exchange of ideas? It just becomes, ‘This is what I believe, and this is what you believe, and we’re never going to agree.’ ”
Both Jaffe and Aldous said they gained valuable experience, both from working with the scholars and hearing their insights.
“I hadn’t interacted with legal scholars to this extent before,” Aldous said. “It’s obviously different from interacting with professors or partners in a law firm. It was a new experience for me, and I really appreciated that aspect of it. Also, picking a topic was a lot more difficult than I imagined. It’s hard to predict what will be a fruitful and blossoming issue a year before the journal will come out.”
Stephanopoulos said he was pleased that they chose election law.
“In my view, the key takeaway from the event is that election law is a very dynamic field with all sorts of interesting work being done,” he said. “This work ranges from philosophical to historical to doctrinal to empirical, and its variety highlights what an exciting subject this is. The students should be congratulated for putting together such a memorable event.”