America at 250: A time to speak law to power

For 250 years, Americans have been having a conversation about legal democracy.  That conversation is now in trouble. The results are on grim display in our respective areas of expertise, which are voting rights and criminal law.

Unchecked power is increasingly wreaking havoc. As its campaign and voting rights decisions make clear, the Supreme Court is unconcerned with the unequal deployment of economic and political power. As a result, our electoral process is dominated by concentrated wealth and private influence.

The fearsome power of the criminal system has always been at best tenuously restrained by law. Today, it has openly muscled its way into political waters as the executive branch flaunts its authority to prosecute and pardon. As we have both argued for years, it is ordinary people who ultimately pay the costs of such governance failures, losing their political voices, autonomy, money, safety, and even ultimately their freedom.

The problems with unchecked power in America are on the rise across the board. From the executive branch to Congress, in finance, media, and the technology sector, concentrated power has increasingly been let off the democratic leash. Public actors ignore the interests of millions of Americans. Private interests make public-facing decisions of national import. Ordinary people are getting thrown under the political bus.

Law-based democracy is supposed to be an antidote to........

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