Professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj presented a paper at a University of Pennsylvania Law Review symposium dedicated to the topic of campaign finance on May 23.

An authority on the American political process, Abu El-Haj presented “Wholly Native to the First Amendment: The Positive Liberty of Self‐Government,” which appears in the online symposium issue, which was published in collaboration with Demos.

Observing that free expression alone cannot enable representative government to function, the article argues that the freedom of speech must be combined with protections for political participation.

Abu El-Haj will also discuss the topic at "Purchasing Power," a conference in New York on June 16 and 17 sponsored by the Ford Foundation and organized by the Scholars Strategy Network, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University and the Department of Political Science at CUNY.