Judiciary oversteps bounds

One week ago, the Duke Student Government Judiciary issued its first ruling based on the new DSG bill of rights. We believe the ruling has negative implications both for the regulation of undergraduate elections by the Board of Elections and the DSG policy-making process more broadly.

The case, Dinner and Wang v. Board of Elections, contended that the Board of Elections had misinterpreted the Senate’s extension of this year’s Senate and Class Council elections, which were postponed due to a technical error. Dinner and Wang also questioned the Senate’s regulations on the way candidates spent money on campaigning.

The Judiciary’s decision, which is rooted almost entirely in the “freedom of speech” clause in the DSG Bill of Rights, has three main pillars. First, the Judiciary ruled that the Board of Elections cannot assign monetary values to candidates’ “speech acts.” Secondly, the BOE cannot regulate speech acts that have no actual monetary cost, and thirdly, neither DSG nor the Board of Elections has the ability to specify or enforce a timeline when these speech acts occur.

The ruling strips the Board of Elections of most or all of its regulatory power, and we believe that each of its components has the potential to negatively affect the student election process. As it stands, many student elections devolve into popularity contests, and deregulation will only shift the discourse further away from relevant concerns about the candidates’ platforms. The third component allows candidates to start campaigning weeks, months or even a full year ahead of elections. Although it is hard to discern whether this will be a net benefit or detriment to “less popular” candidates, the possibility of an effectively never-ending election cycle means a lot more noise, and very little added value, to campus discussion.

Most troubling is that these problems are self-manufactured and confirm our initial skepticism about the DSG Bill of Rights. When the Board of Elections set election timelines and fielded complaints from candidates, it generally worked smoothly and was never the focus of major criticism. It remains to be seen, moreover, how the ruling will affect the highly regulated Young Trustee elections, which have a two-stage electoral procedure.

The Bill of Rights, which is intentionally vague and open to broad interpretation, substantially bolsters the Judiciary’s power of judicial review and, by extension, makes it into a powerful undergraduate policymaking body. The U.S. Supreme Court has large review powers in part because considerable separation exists between citizens and the government. With Duke’s undergraduate government, the separation is much less significant. Disgruntled individual students are often able to affect widespread campus change outside the DSG system.

The Judiciary’s increased power is harmful for at least two reasons. First, its members are neither the most qualified nor representative undergraduate policymakers. Those titles, theoretically, fall to the DSG Senate and executive board. Second, future rulings have the possibility to impact student groups outside of DSG. While we believe the Judiciary should serve as an objective third party to resolve certain issues, the possibility that its broad rulings might affect otherwise autonomous student groups threatens both their independence and the mission that student organizations are meant to carry out.