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In early 2018, President Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) into law. It was enacted mainly in response to failed civil suits against Backpage.com, a website accused of allowing, and even helping, users to post ads of sex trafficking victims. Plaintiffs, minors with ads for them posted on the website, were almost universally blocked by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which granted Backpage immunity for what its users post. FOSTA removes that immunity, as well as amends and adds federal offenses. The law has faced much criticism for going too far, but no one has yet asked if it goes far enough. In other words, would Backpage now lose the suits that could not have been filed before FOSTA? To evaluate the law’s impact, this Note reconsiders the infamous Doe v. Backpage case in light of FOSTA. After analyzing the law through analogous statutes and case law, this Note concludes the law is at most ambiguous as to its legal effect. Thus, not only is the law creating negative side effects for speech online and creating danger for sex workers, it may not even be achieving its legal objective. This Note looks at the widespread reaction to FOSTA, the self-regulation of many websites in response, and explores reasons for that reaction, including the law’s expressive effect. 

Vote dilution doctrine under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act directs courts to look to evidence of election results to determine if all voters have equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. However, not every election in which a minority-preferred candidate prevails is necessarily evidence of equality. Those elections that courts judge to be illusory evidence of equality are said to be characterized by “special circumstances.” When a court recognizes special circumstances surrounding an election, it discounts the evidentiary value of that election, typically to the benefit of vote dilution plaintiffs. To date, no judicial opinion or scholarly work has proposed a comprehensive framework to explain the circumstances courts already recognize or point out the circumstances they ought to recognize. Drawing on the seminal Supreme Court precedent of Thornburg v. Gingles, the Voting Rights Act itself, and over thirty years of lower-court practice, this Note proposes a test. If the circumstances of an election are such that a victory for a minority-preferred candidate belie an ongoing, structural burden on the right to vote, that election is characterized by special circumstances. This Note uses a familiar tripartite framework of the “rights to vote” as an analytical lens for drawing lessons from past decisions and suggesting where the doctrine should go in the future. By recognizing the wider universe of burdens on voting rights, including those typically beyond the reach of judicial remedies, special circumstances doctrine can ensure vote dilution remedies are available where they are needed. 

While the debate over the role of political parties is longstanding and not completely resolved amongst scholars, most reform groups are skeptical that stronger parties are the solution to contemporary problems in the American political system. Looking at the effects of past reforms and related court rulings, we maintain that many of them strengthened the hand of party activists, independently financed candidates, and donors in the nomination process at the expense of elected officials and national party officials. This has not only fueled partisan polarization due to pres- sures from party activists and donors, but it also removed any ability of the party to conduct what some have termed “peer review.” Instead of focusing on reversing past party reforms, however, we propose taking a different tack. We ask what changes might make the political parties more effective umbrella organizations that promote coalition building and better governance in this period of high polarization. Toward that end, we propose some changes that might incentivize American political parties to serve that function better. The parties themselves would have to adopt some of these reforms. Others might require that reform groups and the courts be willing to give political parties a more privileged role in campaign finance.

As Americans, we take for granted that those we entrust with significant authority have been judged by their peers to be competent at the task. Peer review is a concept commonly accepted in most professions. For instance, in medicine “peer review is defined as ‘the objective evaluation of the quality of a physician’s or a scientist’s performance by colleagues.’” That is why we license plumbers, electricians, manicurists, doctors, nurses, and lawyers. We do this in most aspects of life—except politics. In 2016, Americans nominated and then elected Donald Trump, the most unqualified (by virtue of traditional measures of experience and temperament) person ever elected to the Office of the President of the United States, in a system without peer review. This Article is an argument for the restoration of some modicum of peer review in the modern nominating system of both major political parties.

For many centuries, political communities have contrived nominating systems that seek to attain similar goals across different countries—protecting the community from overly ambitious and powerful leaders, and uniting rather than dividing communities at election time around leaders with broad-based appeal. They have done so by resort to procedures that recur almost invariably—procedures framed to avoid plurality victories in multicandidate contests and to insulate nominators’ decisions from outside influence, including the influence of fellow voters’ decisions. One is struck by how painstakingly our forebears worked out the problems of nominations over time, with recurring themes and methods, which (ironically in this age of information) find no echo today in our own presidential nominating system.

Given the widespread dissatisfaction with both major-party nominees in 2016, it is natural to ask if the American presidential nomination process is to blame for producing two such candidates as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But when the dynamics of these two nomination races are examined, there is little evidence that the outcomes would have been affected by any plausible changes in the process. Hillary Clinton did gain an advantage from the Democratic rule that awards automatic delegate status to elected and party officials, but she also won a clear majority of the votes cast by ordinary voters in presidential primaries and of the delegates selected through primaries and caucuses. And though there is evidence that the leadership of the Democratic National Committee favored her nomination and wanted to aid her candidacy, there is little that the committee actually did—or could do—to make such an outcome more likely. On the Republican side, Donald Trump did not win because the Republican process was, in effect, taken over by independents. Trump won a solid plurality of the votes cast by primary voters who identified as Republicans. A different set of delegate allocation rules and a large contingent of Republican superdelegates might have slowed Trump’s road to the nomination, but, given his dominance of the primaries, probably would not have changed the final result. The only rules changes that might have aided both Clinton’s and Trump’s opponents were if more states had used a caucus-convention system instead of a primary to select their national convention delegates. Both Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz fared substantially better in caucuses than in primaries. But given ample evidence that caucuses have a significantly smaller and less representative turnout than primaries, it is unlikely that either party—or their rank-and-file members—would have endorsed a substantially greater use of caucuses.