Five and a half months ago, in August 2023, our article on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, was accepted for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
The article's core thesis – that Section Three's disqualification of insurrectionists from office is legally operative, self-executing, sweeping in scope, and likely disqualifies numerous participants in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election – obviously has enormous implications for our national political life today. Among other important consequences, it means that former president Donald J. Trump, who is running for president again in 2024, is constitutionally disqualified from holding that or any other covered office, unless and until two-thirds of both houses of Congress vote to remove his disqualification.
Shortly after being accepted for publication, we posted the draft manuscript of the article on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN). The article (and its thesis) immediately attracted wide interest: For an academic article, The Sweep and Force of Section Three has provoked an unusual amount of interest and attention. It has been widely discussed on air, in print, online, and in the academy. And it has been widely cited in the current litigation about the enforcement of Section Three. As readers surely know, the Colorado Supreme Court held that Mr. Trump is indeed disqualified by Section Three from future office as a matter of federal constitutional law; and that this renders him ineligible for inclusion on the state primary ballot for election to that office as a matter of Colorado state law. The U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari to review that decision in what is sure to be one of its most important cases of the term.
