The Third Coming of American Plutocracy

Speaker:

• Associate Professor Timothy K. Kuhner

About the Seminar:

Tim Kuhner presented a chapter from his new edited volume, “Democracy by the People: Reforming Campaign Finance in America” (co-edited with Eugene Mazo and published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press). “The Third Coming of American Plutocracy,” will expose the similarities between the different eras in which American democracy has been hijacked by wealth. And it will culminate in an analysis of how President Trump has added to the pre-existing problem of government by and for the wealthy. In conclusion, the speaker invited reflections on Australia’s vulnerabilities the sort of ‘legalized corruption’ that has become well established in the United States.

About the Speaker:

Timothy K. Kuhner is a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School and Associate Professor at the Auckland Law School. He focuses on the law of democracy, especially campaign finance and political corruption. Tim is the author of Capitalism v. Democracy (Stanford University Press) and the coeditor of Democracy by the People (Cambridge University Press). Tim served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Barcelona, a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in Latin America, and a law clerk on the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College and Duke Law School.