Parliamentary America—Now More Than Ever with Maxwell Stearns

In Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy (JHU Press), published in March 2024, Professor Maxwell Stearns contends the United States faces a constitutional crisis that demands radical structural reform to avoid the risk of dictatorship or collapse. Stearns explains how we got to this point and offers three specific reforms—each in the form of a constitutional amendment—that ensure the US emerges a genuinely thriving multi-party democracy. He further explains why despite their radical nature, his reforms are more politically feasible than others dominating public discourse.

During the information age, corresponding to the early 1990s, our major parties have grown so distant that they have emerged as two increasingly distrustful camps, each viewing the other as lacking basic intelligence or as evil. When the book was published, we faced a growing discontent in the choice between two unpopular leaders, Democratic President Joe Biden and former Republican President Donald Trump, along with a corresponding distrust of our political institutions. Joe Biden's notable decline culminated in an embarrassing debate performance, ultimately persuading him to step aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. Donald Trump faced unprecedented challenges, having been twice impeached, convicted on 39 felony counts (and facing several more), and found civilly liable for $5 million for sexual assault. Despite all that, Trump defeated Harris, capturing the Senate and House, and unlike in 2016, the popular vote.

These events have intensified the crisis our nation faces, bolstering the case for the reforms Stearns proposes. The proposed reforms effect change on the two key democratic axes, how we elect an enlarged House of Representatives and the system of presidential selection and accountability. Stearns contends the most prominent reform proposals—ranked choice voting, multi-member congressional districts, congressional term limits, and replacing the Electoral College with the national popular vote—can neither solve our crisis nor be enacted. By contrast, Stearns's proposed reforms will fix the crisis and are enactable. Among other benefits, they ensure that all sitting members of the House and Senate remain incumbents in their existing districts or States.

Stearns takes his readers on a virtual world tour, to England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela, discussing other nations along the way. After demonstrating how these nations' inevitably flawed electoral systems operate, including their successes and failures in facing down their own threats to democracy, Stearns explains how we can adapt the best features as our own. 

Some will regard Stearns's proposals as too radical. Others will claim they are not radical enough. Professor Stearns will explain why his proposals, now more than ever, are the least radical means of radically repairing our broken democracy. 

Maxwell L. Stearns is the Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law, University of Maryland Carey School of Law. He has discussed Parliamentary America, live and virtually, across the country, including on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.  He is an interdisciplinary scholar. He applies the methodologies of economics, broadly defined, to study private and public law, along with institutional decision-making processes. He has authored several books on the Supreme Court, electoral reform, and the economic analysis of law. His scholarly articles appear in such leading academic journals as Yale Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, California Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Notre Dame Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review. Stearns blogs at www.blindspotblog.us on law, politics, and culture. 

Professor Stearns joined the faculty at Maryland Carey Law in fall 2006 and was professor of law at the George Mason University School of Law from 1992 through 2005. He practiced law as a litigation associate with Palmer & Dodge in Boston and with Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz in Philadelphia. 
Professor Stearns earned his BA, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and his JD from the University of Virginia, where he was a member of the Virginia Law Review and the Order of the Coif. He clerked for the Honorable Harrison L. Winter, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He has also taught at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, the University of Michigan School of Law, the University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland; the Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia; and Canterbury University Department of Economics and Finance, Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was a visiting Erskine Fellow.