Farewell! (Derek Muller)

Thanks to Howard and the crew here at Prawfs for indulging me for nearly two months. I deeply appreciate the conversation and hope I provided some content prawfs found valuable!

If you'd like to read more of my work, I blog at Excess of Democracy, which I launched five years ago and named after a phrase used by Elbridge Gerry during the constitutional convention. It has some election law content, but it includes a variety of topics, especially on legal education. You can also find me on Twitter.

Finally, I'll highlight a few of my articles in the event any piques your interest! (More drafts to be posted this summer....)

• Hot off the press is Legal Quandaries in the Alabama Senate Election of 2017, 69 Ala. L. Rev. 983 (2018), examining the many complexities of the Seventeenth Amendment, special elections generally, and Alabama state law specifically that arose with the controversy surrounding Roy Moore.
• The High Cost of Lowering the Bar is a work in progress with my colleague Rob Anderson. Through a study of bar discipline rates in California, we conclude that lower bar exam scores are correlated with higher discipline rates, and that lowering the passing score would result in higher discipline rates. We acknowledge we lack a causal relationship, and we offer different ways of thinking through the costs and benefits in a more holistic way when it comes to evaluating bar exam cut scores. (Feedback welcome as this remains a work in progress!)
• 'Natural Born' Disputes in the 2016 Presidential Election, 85 Fordham L. Rev. 1097 (2016), notes the many problems, mostly jurisdictional, that arose during questions surrounding the eligibility of Ted Cruz and other candidates in the 2016 election. It calls for a constitutional amendment to quash future disputes. (For a much more robust treatment of the constitutional amendment question, check out Kevin Walsh's forthcoming piece in the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy, The 'Irish Born' One American Citizenship Amendment.)
• Ballot Speech, 58 Ariz. L. Rev. 693 (2016), identifies the ballot itself--the names of candidates, their party affiliation, descriptive terms--as an essential resource for candidates to speak to voters and offers a framework that would better protect that forum.
• Finally, as the Connecticut legislature recently passed the National Popular Vote Compact, I thought I'd share a couple of older pieces on why I think such a compact requires congressional consent under the Compact Clause, and a piece on the practical difficulties of a national presidential election while administration of the Electoral College and the right to vote remains largely left to the states.