1988 is a presidential election year in the United States. As in previous presidential and congressional campaigns, millions of dollars will be spent by candidates seeking elected office. Campaign financing in the United States, as in other western democracies, raises a question which strikes at the moral basis of the system of government. Thus, how do we secure and guarantee political equality in a society of deep-rooted economic inequality? It may well be that de Tocqueville was right when he wrote that “Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.” Yet the integrity of these institutions demands that control of economic resources does not permit domination of the political process on the simple expedient of unrestrained liberty for all in the political arena. If political equality is to mean anything in practice, the political machine must not be the preserve of the few who are ready, willing, and able to exploit private or personal economic resources. The purpose of this paper is to consider how this problem has been addressed in the United States. The paper traces the origins of the modern legislation and examines the tension between the legislative and the judicial branches of government. A particularly disturbing tendency has been the unwillingness on the part of the courts to sustain the legislation in the face of constitutional challenge, thereby facilitating the continued domination of the political process by moneyed interests. Given the growing movement for a Bill of Rights in Britain, these developments may yet be of some practical significance in this country.

Property owners in modern common-law jurisdictions have a wide variety of legal instruments at their disposal to effect the inter-generational transfer of wealth. Indeed the object of much reform in the area of estate transmission in the course of this century has been to reduce the formality required to execute the comprehensive succession arrangements which anthropologists and historians have termed “strategies.” Yet the process of relaxation of formality has not produced a law devoid of requirement, because societal interest is thought at times to conflict with unimpinged informality of transfer. For example, legislatures and courts believe that some formality protects the property owner (who at the time his act has legal effect may be dead) from those who seek to influence or subvert the succession process. Moreover, because nearly all members of society partake of the process, the administrative burden on the judicial system is lessened when law provides a clear set of hurdles for a disposition to surmount in order to be valid. Likewise, the more detailed and tailored to these aims the requirements for validity are constructed, the less likely disputes regarding dispositions will arise. Thus, in modern law, the virtue of simplification is balanced with protective concerns, creating a law of wills and trusts on the one hand sufficiently complex both to embarrass practitioners and confound students, but leaving individuals relatively free to craft estate plans consistent with their own desires.

The rule of practice that requires judges to direct juries that it is dangerous to act on the uncorroborated evidence of certain categories of witness, namely accomplices, the alleged victims of sexual offences and children, has been diluted in certain jurisdictions, and subjected to rigorous criticism by a number of academic commentators. In this article it is proposed to consider whether a mandatory corroboration warning can ever be justified in respect of a particular category of witness. Rather than consider in detail the arguments in favour of retaining the warning for each of the present categories of witness, it is proposed to examine the case for the very idea of a corroboration warning in respect of any category of witness. We shall approach this question by first considering what it is that a corroboration warning requires a jury to do, over and above their ordinary task of determining the credibility of the evidence against the accused and deciding whether the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Attention has focused on the “enormous superstructure” that has been erected on the basic proposition that the evidence of some witnesses should be approached with caution and on the heavy burden that this imposes on a trial judge summing up to the jury. But another matter to consider is the demands that a corroboration warning imposes on the jury and whether it can ever be justified to make these demands in respect of particular categories of witness.