Reschedule date to be announced.

In response to last month's Supreme Court decision to roll back campaign finance restrictions, the Woodrow Wilson School will host a panel discussion titled "Democratic Elections in America After Citizens United" at 4:30, Wednesday, February 10, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall on the Princeton University campus. The discussion is part of the School's "Up to the Minute" series, which focuses on domestic and international events as they occur.

Panel discussants will include John Dinan, the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s James Madison Program; Nolan McCarty, Associate Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School and the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs; Nathaniel Persily, the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Political Science at Columbia Law School; and Paul Starr, the Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs and Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School.  Paul Frymer, Acting Director, 2009-2010, of the Woodrow Wilson School’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) and Associate Professor at the Department of Politics at Princeton, will moderate the panel.

John Dinan’s research focuses on state constitutionalism, federalism, and American political development. He is the author of several books, including “The American State Constitutional Tradition” and “Keeping the People’s Liberties: Legislators, Citizens, and Judges as Guardians of Rights.” For the past several years, he has edited the “Annual Review of American Federalism” issue of Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and he writes an annual review of “State Constitutional Developments” for the Book of the States. He is currently working on a book assessing the role of the Supreme Court of the United States in the development of American federalism.

Nolan McCarty’s research interests include U.S. politics, democratic political institutions, and political game theory. He is the co-author of two books: “Political Game Theory” (2006, Cambridge University Press with Adam Meirowitz) and “Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches” (2006, MIT Press with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal). McCarty was the program co-chair of the 2005 Midwest Political Association Meetings and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during academic 2004-05 year. During academic year 2007-2008, he was the acting dean of the Woodrow Wilson School. He blogs about American politics.

Nathaniel Persily is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Political Science and the Director of the Center for Law and Politics at Columbia Law School.  His scholarship focuses on American election law or what is sometimes called the "law of democracy," which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, and redistricting. Persily has published dozens of articles on the legal regulation of political parties, on issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, on voting rights, and on campaign finance reform.

Paul Starr, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” is co-editor of The American Prospect, a liberal quarterly about politics, policy, and ideas that he founded with journalist Robert Kuttner and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. He is also author of “Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism” which examines what liberalism is about, how it has developed, and how it ought to be conceived and fought for. His previous book, “The Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of American Communications,” won the Goldsmith Book Prize. Starr has appeared before numerous congressional committees and on national TV news programs.

Paul Frymer teaches and writes on topics in American law and politics, particularly as they intersect with issues of democratic representation, race and civil rights, and labor and employment. He is a former LAPA fellow (2004-2005), and prior to teaching at Princeton, taught at both UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego. He is the author of two books: “Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America” and “Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party.” He has also either authored or is currently writing about topics ranging from legal understandings of political parties to the racial politics of Hurricane Katrina and affirmative action to the role of law in the historical development of American territorial expansion.

This event is co-sponsored b the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and international Affairs, the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, the Program in Law and Public Affairs, and the James Madison Program.  It is free and open to the public.