Joan London named as chair to the PBA Municipal Law Section
July 19th, 2010Dear Friends,
There is an announcement in today’s Pennsylvania Bar News that our partner and friend, Joan London, has been named chair of the PBA Municipal Law Section, which deals with the development and practical working of the law, both substantive and procedural, relating to municipal subdivisions of states, with particular reference to those of the commonwealth. Her appointment has been announced state-wide. She’s not the type that would brag, so I’ll do it for her. This is an honor for Joan, undoubtedly in recognition of her great investment of time and expertise on behalf of the Municipal Law Section. It is a great credit to her, and to our whole firm.
Please congratulate and thank Joan when you see her.
Pete Peter F. Schuchman, Jr., Esquire KOZLOFF STOUDT ATTORNEYS
Kozloff Stoudt Awarded Silver Award
April 29th, 2010Kozloff Stoudt Attorneys is pleased to announce that it is the recipient of the United Way of Berks County’s “Silver Award” at the conclusion of the 2009 United Way Campaign. This is a historic milestone for Kozloff Stoudt employees who annually give of their time and resources to various charitable organizations. During this year of economic downturn, with so many families in need, a focused effort was made in conjunction with UA of Berks to increase Kozloff Stoudt employees’ collective contributions to the UA Campaign, and the effort paid off…for our community. Kozloff Stoudt is proud of its employees’ generosity, and pleased to be a recipient of this award recognizing its “employee campaign excellence!”
Land Use Institute Document
February 5th, 2010Click here to download our Land Use Institute Document
Decades of Campaign Finance Law Under Siege
July 24th, 2009Many decades of hard-earned reforms to the nation’s campaign finance laws are in danger of being dismantled by a litigation offensive mounted by interests opposed to those reforms.
Emboldened by the conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court, ideological and interest group opponents of campaign finance regulation have brought an unprecedented number of cases in the past year to challenge campaign finance laws at the federal, state and municipal levels. The challenges are being brought by national party committees, trade associations, ideological groups and so-called “527” organizations. These opponents are often represented by attorneys working for tax-exempt organizations whose public filings reveal little about their funding sources and whose primary mission is to overturn existing campaign finance laws.
What is most striking about these groups’ litigation effort is that it challenges longstanding campaign finance laws that have already been upheld and declared constitutional. For this reason, their challenges often fail in the lower courts as these courts simply uphold preexisting Supreme Court precedent that is supportive of campaign finance regulation. The problem is that under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court is quickly undermining that very precedent.
The Roberts Court, however, is not overturning earlier Supreme Court rulings openly. In their current offensive, anti-reform groups rarely challenge the general constitutionality of campaign finance law “on its face,” but instead frame their cases as challenges to the law “as applied” to specific situations. These kind of “as applied” challenges have given the Roberts Court the opportunity to significantly erode existing precedent without having to reverse such precedent explicitly. Effectively, however, the Roberts Court has begun to overturn a variety of campaign laws previously upheld by the High Court.
At the federal level, recent challenges are attempting to tear down many decades’ worth of election law, including the principles behind restrictions on corporations that extend as far back as the Tillman Act of 1907. That Act banned political contributions by corporations and was shepherded through Congress by President Teddy Roosevelt in an era when corporations wielded staggering power in Washington as the main sources of funding for political parties. Challenges to other long-standing provisions of the election laws, such as coordinated party spending limits, demonstrate that the mission of anti-reform advocates is far more ambitious than merely rolling back the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), also known as McCain-Feingold. Instead, their apparent goal is to go back nearly a century and dismantle many of the campaign finance reforms enacted in the wake of the Watergate era scandals and to revert to an era of unregulated, undisclosed spending in federal elections that fueled public outrage at the turn of the 20th Century.
