Bite-Sized Business Law
Looking for the latest in legal business news?
Get a breakdown of the top stories in business law from industry leaders on the front lines with Bite-Sized Business Law. Host Amy Martella takes a closer look at the latest corporate happenings through interviews with the attorneys, legal experts, public figures, and scholars behind the news to distill business law’s biggest stories into bite-sized portions.
This is your chance to go further into the world of business law and stay up to date with legal cases and industry trends.
Corporations impact us all, leading changes that extend far beyond business to shape the economy, public policy, technology, and beyond. Looking at the big picture, Amy discusses not only the underlying issues in business ethics and legal cases leading the biggest stories but also sparks thought-provoking discussions on where the law should be headed.
Amy is the Executive Director of the Corporate Law Center at Fordham University School of Law. Her background ranges from big law to government to tech startups, allowing her to offer an insider’s perspective of the issues that shape corporate actions, large and small. Covering crypto regulation to securities fraud, AI’s impact to Elon Musk’s pay package, Bite-Sized Business Law covers it all with guests of varying viewpoints to provide the nuanced analysis needed to tackle complex problems.
Whether you're looking for the latest in legal insight on intellectual property, mergers and acquisitions, business ethics or legal cases in the business law world, you’ll find it here. Enjoying a thoughtful perspective on the news stories of the moment, Bite-Sized Business Law examines big issues and delivers them in small doses.
Bite-Sized Business Law is a project by the Corporate Law Center at Fordham Law. The Center serves as a hub for scholars, professionals, policymakers, and students to engage in the study, discussion, and debate of current issues in corporate law. The Center focuses on aspects of corporate law, corporate compliance, antitrust law, and securities regulation. Through initiatives like the Mergers and Acquisitions seminar and the Securities Litigation and Arbitration Clinic, students actively engage in real-world research and cases, bridging the gap between classroom learning and practical application in the legal field.
Bite-Sized Business Law
Big Spenders: The Evolution of Corporate Money in Elections
How did our laws evolve to allow corporate spending on elections and who were the players driving the effort to deregulate campaign finance? In this episode, we are joined by Ann Southworth, professor of law at UC Irvine School of Law and co-director of the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession. Her latest book, Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending, unpacks the legal, political, and social forces behind the deregulation of campaign finance. Through the lens of her book, we explore how legal scholars, advocacy groups, lawyers, judges, and political leaders orchestrated a decades-long effort to reframe money as speech and dismantle regulations on campaign spending. We discuss the key players and role of conservative legal networks in the political landscape and examine the impact of landmark cases like Citizens United on the electoral system. Join us for an expert perspective on the machinery that redefined campaign finance and the broader implications for society with Professor Ann Southworth.
Key Points From This Episode:
- Research on conservative legal movements that inspired Big Money Unleashed.
- The influence of scholars and advocacy groups in shaping American legal doctrine.
- How money was framed as speech under the First Amendment.
- Professor Southworth’s data on some differences between challengers and reformers.
- Mitch McConnell’s leadership in challenging campaign finance laws.
- How deregulation advocacy groups modeled their strategies on NAACP litigation tactics.
- Liberal allies in the campaign against regulating election spending.
- Shifts in Supreme Court doctrine with Citizens United and other cases.
- The rise of dark money and its impact on election transparency and public trust.
- Insights on whether certain campaign finance deregulation methods are being used to push other legal agendas.
- Why public opinion on campaign finance remains a rare point of bipartisan agreement.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Big Money Unleashed: The Campaign to Deregulate Election Spending
Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition
Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession (CERLP)