The central front in the battle over campaign finance laws is the definition of corruption. The Supreme Court has allowed restrictions on the giving and spending of money in connection with elections only when they serve to avoid corruption or the appearance of corruption. The constitutionality of such laws, therefore, depends on how the Court defines corruption. Over the years, campaign finance cases have conceived of corruption in both broad and narrow terms, with the most recent cases defining it especially narrowly. While supporters and critics of campaign finance laws have argued for and against these different formulations, both sides have missed the more foundational issue: Should the Court define corruption at all?

This Article argues that it should not. Corruption is a derivative concept, which means that it depends on a theory of the institution involved. In order to define corruption of an official or institution, one needs an account of how the official ought to act or how the institution ought to function. Defining legislative corruption, therefore, requires a theory of the legislator's role in a well-functioning democracy. The Supreme Court's campaign finance case law has ignored the implications of this widely shared and deceptively simple idea.

Drawing an analogy to apportionment and gerrymandering cases, this Article argues that there are important reasons for the Court to defer to legislative judgment about how best to conceive of a legislator's role in our democracy. Those cases counsel that where both individual rights and questions of democratic theory are at issue, the Court should be cautious about whether judicial intervention is appropriate. Just as the Court is hesitant to define good government, so too it should be reluctant to define corruption.

This Article explores the problems that arise when a will fails to dispose of an individual's entire estate, so that she dies partially testate and partially intestate. The questions then raised include (1) whether provisions contained in the will purporting to redefine the individual's intestate heirs should supersede the statutory designations of those heirs, (2) whether inter vivos gifts to heirs should qualify as advancements on the inheritances of those heirs under conditions of partial intestacy, and, most broadly, (3) whether courts should fill in the incomplete portion of an individual's estate plan by extrapolating from the distributive preferences set out in the fragmentary will or by independent reference to the statutory rules of intestacy. The intent of testators is bound to vary on each of these points, this Article argues. In order to account for this predictable variation, lawmakers should grant courts limited discretion to resolve each of these issues on a case-by-case basis, taking into consideration both intrinsic and extrinsic evidence. Such an approach would differentiate the rules of partial intestacy from complete intestacy, which operates according to mechanical rules. This Article suggests policy reasons for drawing that distinction. The Article supports its analysis with empirical evidence drawn from data sets of published cases, a resource not previously exploited in connection with quantitative studies of inheritance law.