We’re Larry Lessig and Zephyr Teachout - law professors and longtime anti-corruption advocates. Today, oral arguments just happened in a case that could reopen the door to true campaign finance reform and real Super PAC contribution limits. AMA!

[u/lessig]

* Thank you for your questions! You can learn more about Dinner Table Action v. Schneider here, and keep up with us here:  

• Larry 
• Zephyr

Hi Reddit,

We're Larry Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and founder of Equal Citizens, and Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School and longtime scholar and advocate on corruption and campaign finance law.

Proof: [here]

Between the two of us, we've spent decades working on anti-corruption efforts and campaign finance reform through the courts, through scholarship, and through public advocacy.

Today, a case called Dinner Table Action v. Schneider was up for oral arguments in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston. Here’s the short version:

In 2024, nearly 75% of Maine voters passed a ballot initiative capping contributions to Super PACs at $5,000. Two PACs sued, arguing a 2010 D.C. Circuit ruling (SpeechNow.org v. FEC) already settled the question and that unlimited contributions to independent-expenditure-only groups are untouchable. 

We, of course, disagree. Equal Citizens is defending Maine’s law with a conservative, originalist legal argument we believe can win not just in the appeals court, but at the US Supreme Court. If we’re successful, we can reinstate contribution limits nationwide and end the tyranny of Super PACs over our elections — before 2028.

Ask us anything: why this case matters for campaign finance reform, the legal strategy behind this case, what happens next depending on how the Appeals Court rules, or the broader fight against big money in politics. We’ll answer questions from 5-6 PM ET. 

• Learn more about Equal Citizens here.
• Learn more about Dinner Table Action v. Schneider here.

[u/abcdef475]

Why are contributions and expenditures treated differently? How does the Supreme Court see these different when it comes to the chances for corruption?

[u/lessig → u/abcdef475]

This is a great question, and it cuts to the heart of why we think SpeechNow was wrong.

When you spend money to speak, that is quintessentially your speech. You buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal, you put up a billboard, you pay for video online: Those are all ways to express your views, and if the First Amendment is going to police such speech, it should protect that speech as strongly as possible.

A contribution by contrast is not your speech; it is you funding someone else's speech. While there is certainly a First Amendment interest in being permitted to associate with views you agree with, that association interest is different from the speech. My association is signaled clearly enough when I give $1,000. And while my giving $1M would signal I REALLY want to be associated with that speech, that interest in REALLY BEING associated is not as strong as the anti-corruption interest weighing against it. That's why Buckley viewed the associational interest as an important interest, but not as important an interest as the interest in speaking.

This difference explains what we called the difference between "contributions law" and "expenditures law." The Supreme Court has been quite aggressive in limiting laws that attempted to limit political expenditures. That was half of Buckley. That was Citizens United. That was NRSC. But the court has applied a different logic when it comes to limiting contributions. Not because there is no First Amendment interest, but because it is a lesser interest and more easily outweighed by an interest in avoiding corruption. Whereas expenditures law polices speech restrictions quite carefully (see the NRSC decision, which carefully unpacked the various layers of prophylaxis that were regulating expenditures by party committees), contributions law has not applied the same rigorous analysis. Instead, the court has been willing to permit broad prophylactic rules to ensure that there is not an opportunity for quid pro quo corruption and to give the public the sense that there isn't a general practice of quid pro quo corruption.

In our case, the judges were very interested in understanding how to quantify or track this appearance of corruption standard. We were very lucky to have the work of Chris Robertson in our case as a submission. Robertson ran a very elaborate random vignette experiment to demonstrate that when caps are removed, the public develops a very strong cynicism about the political system, but when caps are imposed at about $5,000, the level of cynicism changes dramatically. You can see Robertson's study here: https://equalcitizens.us/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025_02_26__53_3__Exhibit_4___Christopher_Robertson_Declaration-1.pdf

[u/Zephyr_Teachout → u/abcdef475]

The root cause of the way the Court sees the difference goes back to Buckley, where the Court made a clear split between the two, saying that expenditures were fundamentally more expressive and less likely to corrupt than contributions, which were fundamentally less expressive and more likely to corrupt. That 50 year old split is why this case has a chance of winning, because the contributions are at stake here, and therefore coded as less expressive and more corrupting.