Voters' Rights and Parties' Wrongs: Early Political Party Regulation in the State Courts, 1886-1915

Winkler, Adam

doi:10.2307/1123505

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“…Courts have also regulated parties, often issuing hostile rulings in areas such as campaign finance, ballot access, primary statutes, and civil service protections (Peltason 1998;Winkler 2000;Lowenstein 2006.) These decisions are harder to explain as stemming from parties' interests.…”

Section: The Rise Of Regulation and The Entrenchment Of The Two-partymentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Parties in American Political Development

Karol

2014

Oxford Handbooks Online

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This article examines the role of political parties in America’s political development, with emphasis on parties as institutions. It considers three developments in American politics: the emergence of mass parties that flourished during the so-called Party Period in the mid-nineteenth century; the decline and increasing regulation of traditional parties since the Progressive Era; and the revival of parties in a new form since the 1970s. It also analyses how parties have influenced—and have been influenced by—major institutions such as Congress, the Presidency, the national bureaucracy, and interest groups. The article concludes by discussing two key concerns of scholars of American political development: development and exceptionalism.

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Section: The Rise Of Regulation and The Entrenchment Of The Two-partymentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Parties in American Political Development

Karol

2014

Oxford Handbooks Online

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“…. SeeWinkler (2000) drawing a comparison between parties and business corporations, but not nonprofit ones.203. On unions, see Levi et al (chapter 9, this volume).…”

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Voluntary Associations, Corporate Rights, and the State: Legal Constraints on the Development of American Civil Society, 1750-1900

Bloch¹,

Lamoreaux²

2015

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who wrote comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Guillaume Frencia, Brittany Adams, and Ben Nelson, who assisted us with research. In addition, we benefited from valuable feedback from the anonymous referees for the University of Chicago Press and from the participants at preparatory conferences sponsored by NBER and the Yale Program in Economic History in 2012, 2013, and 2014. For acknowledgments, sources of research support, and disclosure of the authors' material financial relationships, if any, please see http:// www .nber .org /chapters /c13511 .ack. 232 Ruth H. Bloch and Naomi R. Lamoreaux of Hutchins's widow and son, the will's executor asked the state's Chancery Court to invalidate the bequest. Since the American Revolution, state courts and statutes had overturned dozens of similar wills leaving legacies to unincorporated associations. 3 The outcome of this case proved no different. New Jersey's Chancery Court rejected Hutchins's bequests on what were in effect political grounds. The legal question at the heart of the case, according to Vice Chancellor John Taylor Bird, was "What is a charity?" 4 Reviewing the precedents, Bird conceded that some types of voluntary associations, such as evangelical missionary societies, were routinely regarded as charitable even though they aimed to destroy "existing laws, customs, institutions, and religions." 5 He also acknowledged two recent path-breaking decisions by the Massachusetts and Pennsylvania supreme courts that defined charity widely enough to encompass bequests for the dissemination of abolitionist and atheist ideas (albeit only on the condition that the trustees accept their primary goal to be education and not opposition to the law or Christianity). 6 In Bird's view, however, the purposes of the book fund were more fundamentally subversive. George's vilification of private landholding posed too great a threat to the law for the trust to stand. "Whatever might be the rights of the individual author in the discussion of such questions in the abstract, it certainly would not become the court to aid in the distribution of literature which denounces as robbery-as a crime-an immense proportion of the judicial determinations of the higher courts. This would not be legally charitable." 7 George successfully appealed to New Jersey's high court the following year, but the damage was done. Reversing the Chancery Court's verdict, Chief Justice Mercer Beazley ruled the key issue was not George's radicalism but Hutchins's intentions. The will itself, which benignly described George's works as "spreading the light" of "liberty and justice in these United States of America," disclosed no inclination to violate the law. Rather the book fund, Beazley concluded, was best understood as akin to a library and, therefore, stood squarely within the "charitable" domain of education. 8 Nonetheless, George's hard-won victory brought little satisfaction to him and his followers. According to a biography written later by his son, legal fees devoured a sizable portion of th...

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N.Y. State Bd. of Elections v. Torres: Is the Right to Vote a Constitutional Constraint on Partisan Nominating Conventions?

Elmendorf

2007

Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy

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Voters' Rights and Parties' Wrongs: Early Political Party Regulation in the State Courts, 1886-1915

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Political Parties in American Political Development

Political Parties in American Political Development

Voluntary Associations, Corporate Rights, and the State: Legal Constraints on the Development of American Civil Society, 1750-1900

N.Y. State Bd. of Elections v. Torres: Is the Right to Vote a Constitutional Constraint on Partisan Nominating Conventions?

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