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Full-Text Articles in Law
Leroy Pitzer: Citizen, Voter, Lunatic?, Rabia Belt
Leroy Pitzer: Citizen, Voter, Lunatic?, Rabia Belt
Studio for Law and Culture
In a 1905 Ohio case, In re South Charleston Election Contest, Leroy Pitzer was accused of being a “lunatic” or an “idiot” and thus unable to vote in a tight and contest election that ripped the town of South Charleston in half. After intense deliberations – and considering 29 different definitions of lunacy and idiocy – the court decided that something was wrong with Leroy Pitzer, but they could not figure out exactly what. They also could not determine who Pitzer voted for. Unfortunately, without his vote, the election result was a tie and the entire election was rerun.
The …
Three Questions For The Right To Vote Amendment, Richard Briffault
Three Questions For The Right To Vote Amendment, Richard Briffault
Faculty Scholarship
Should the United States Constitution be amended to guarantee the right to vote? To the average citizen – and probably many lawyers – this almost certainly would be taken as an absurd question. Most people probably assume that the right to vote is, at least in principle, already guaranteed by the Constitution even if our practices fall short of our ideals. But, in fact, although the Constitution frequently refers to the “right … to vote” – and the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence has long treated voting as a fundamental right – the right to vote per se is nowhere guaranteed. A …