Members of the Tobin Project’s Institutions of Democracy working group collaborated with The American Prospect in May to produce a series of white papers and blog posts responding to the Supreme Court’s decision to decline to rule on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, designed to protect minorities from facing obstacles to voting.
In May, the Tobin Project asked five scholar-experts from varying diciplines to respond to Elizabeth Warren's (Harvard Law School) proposal for a Financial Product Safety Commission (FPSC), which has been introduced in Congress.
Today’s doctoral students will shape the intellectual paradigms that influence our public policy in the future. Yet this larger project can be obscured by career concerns and an attendant need to not stray too far from a discipline’s intellectual orthodoxies.
America faces the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the heart of this economic turmoil has been debate about the role of regulation and deregulation both in precipitating the crisis and finding possible remedies. Given the sheer scale of federal assets now entrenched in troubled corporations, and the new administration’s ambitious reform objectives, we need more than ever a long-term reevaluation of the relationships between the market and the state.
The Financial Product Safety Commission Act of 2009 has been introduced by Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA) in the House and by Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) in the Senate. The bills urge Congress to create a government body that would track and regulate consumer financial products, ideas derived directly from Elizabeth Warren’s (Harvard Law School) research and proposals.
Elections scholarship has a long and distinguished history in the social sciences, and it emerged as a full-fledged legal discipline during the 1990s. Its academic and policy significance was underscored by the tumult surrounding the 2000 presidential election, which sparked a growing interest in the field and spawned new interdisciplinary work between law professors, social scientists, and historians.