Person:
Eisler, Jacob Morse

Profile Picture

Email Address

AA Acceptance Date

Birth Date

Research Projects

Organizational Units

Job Title

Last Name

Eisler

First Name

Jacob Morse

Name

Eisler, Jacob Morse

Filters

20161

Settings

Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.9c37acbe-a5c2-4641-90c8-9a7e423f3b7b

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Publication
    Personhood and the Law of Corruption in Federal Courts
    (2016-05-17) Eisler, Jacob Morse; Rosenblum, Nancy L.; Alt, James E.; Beerbohm, Eric
    The treatment of corruption in US federal law has evolved in an inconsistent manner and endured repeated seemingly erratic shifts. This dissertation considers the treatment of political and electoral corruption both comparatively between institutions and internally within institutions, using the political philosophy of Plato as a theoretical foundation. It thus offers three essays: one that examines Plato’s treatment of corruption in his seminal political works (The Republic, The Statesman, and The Laws); a second that considers the comparative treatment of corruption by Congress and the Supreme Court in the context of both electoral and official corruption; and a third that considers the internal partisan dispute within the Supreme Court over the proper treatment of campaign finance. This dissertation takes as its methodology close analysis of text, whether Supreme Court opinions, the Congressional legislative record, or Platonic dialogues; and it takes as its subject matter the character of persons who participate in the political process. Its essential observation is that the US conception of law does not give credence to the character (in the deep sense) of participants in the political process, even as such questions of character overdetermines legal debates, as present in the materials that shape corruption law itself. By careful analysis of these texts, the unspoken but critical role of character in election law can be understood. The fruit of this analysis that US election law is riven by debates over the proper contours of anti-corruption regulation that reside upon the character of those it regulates. Within the Court this has produced partisan conflict; between the Court and Congress it has produced two differing views of how the anti-corruption regime should be constructed.