MEDIA ADVISORY
Press Contact: Laura Castro, UT Law Communications,
512-232-1229, or 512-825-9525 (mobile)
AUSTIN, Texas — L.A. (Scot) Powe, Jr., a constitutional law professor at The University of Texas School at Austin who teaches and writes about the Supreme Court’s place in American society, is available to discuss with the media the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday to uphold portions of the nation’s new campaign finance law.
Powe, who holds the Anne Green Regents Chair in Law and Professor of Government at The University of Texas, is the country's foremost expert on the First Amendment and the broadcast media. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas before joining the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin in 1971.
His numerous publications include four books--The Warren Court and American Politics (Harvard, 2000), Regulating Broadcast Programming (MIT, 1994) (co-author), The Fourth Estate and the Constitution (California, 1991), and American Broadcasting and the First Amendment (California, 1987)--as well as many articles, including recently "Converging First Amendment Principles for Converging Communications Media" (Yale Law Journal, 1995) (co-author) and "The Not-So-Brave New Constitutional Order" (Harvard Law Review, 2003). He has been a Visiting Professor of Law at both Georgetown University and the University of California at Berkeley, and is a member of the American Law Institute. Additional information on Powe can be found at: http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/spowe/.
The full text of the Supreme Court’s opinion, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission et al, is available at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/. The opinion and dissents are close to 300 pages and the syllabus is 19 pages. The judgment is affirmed in part and reversed in part, with several different justices writing different parts of the opinion.
The Supreme Court upheld the most important provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform act of 2002, ruling that the government may ban unlimited donations, or “soft money,” to political parties and restrict "issue ads" that benefit individual candidates. Challengers to the law said it violated First Amendment rights of free speech in political campaigns. But the justices upheld all of the major new restrictions by 5-to-4 votes.