Law Commons^™

What 2020 Really Needed: A New Standard For Impeachment, Erin Daley

Hofstra Law Review

The article focuses on government with a system of checks and balances to prevent one person or one party from upsetting the balance of power. It mentions system is found in the Impeachment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and exercise their right to vote and remove people from positions of power. It also mentions Framers rejected the "maladministration" standard for impeachment and substituted high crimes and Misdemeanors.

A New Stage In The Struggle For Voting Rights, Lynn Adelman

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Work Is Not Done: Frederick Douglass And Black Suffrage, Bradley Rebeiro

Notre Dame Law Review

Since antiquity, political theorists have tried to identify the proper balance between ideals and pragmatism in political and public life. Machiavelli and Aristotle both offered prudence as an approach, but with different ends in mind: stability and the good, respectively. Among the many contributions Kurt Lash’s two-volume set on the Reconstruction Amendments provides to present-day discourse, it supplies the careful reader an answer to this timeless question by highlighting the role of Frederick Douglass in public deliberation over the Fifteenth Amendment. In this Essay I argue that Amer-ican abolitionist, social reformer, and statesman Frederick Douglass illustrates and enacts the Aristotelian …

Maybe We Don't Need To Find Waldo After All: Why Preventing Voter Fraud Is Not A Compelling Interest, Brandon T. Goldstein

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Note takes the position, counter to established jurisprudence, that the prevention of voter fraud is not a compelling state interest that can independently justify restrictions on the right to vote. It will seek to do so through two mechanisms. First, it will argue that the right to vote is unjustifiably treated differently than other rights by courts, using a comparison to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Second, it will argue that current jurisprudence holding the prevention of voter fraud to be a compelling interest misunderstands the inherent means-ends distinction in voting rights standards. The prevention of voter …

The Price Of Democracy: Evaluating The Excessing Fines Clause In Light Of Florida Felon Disenfranchisement, Raven Peters

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Note aims to show how the current test of proportionality is insufficient in combatting excessive fines, especially considering the racist and discriminatory practices of felon disenfranchisement. In Part I, this Note evaluates the background of the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause and its recent incorporation against the states. Part II will provide insight into the history of felon disenfranchisement in Florida and the fight for voter restoration through the passage of Florida Amendment 4. This section will then tell of the subsequent implementation of Florida Statutes section 98.0751 requiring ex-felons to pay all fines and fees associated with their …

Pursuit Of The Vote: Factors Utilized In Resisting Discrimination In Democratic Elections, Matthew Nicholson

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Suffrage movements make use of various social and political factors to pressure their governments to expand the scope of voting rights. Using McAdam’s political process model, I will analyze how disenfranchised groups’ use of nonviolent demonstration, appeals to international pressure, and appeals to religion, affects their success. This will also highlight patterns that emerge when groups are willing to instigate violence in pursuit of their goals. Most studies examine these variables in the context of the pursuit of independence or revolution, whereas this study focuses on groups wishing to remain within a system given their desired reforms. I will analyze …

The Coming Of The Fifteenth Amendment: The Republican Party And The Right To Vote In The Early Reconstruction Era, Earl Maltz

Louisiana Law Review

The year 2020 marked the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments that fundamentally transformed both the structure of the Constitution and the nature of American federalism. The Fifteenth Amendment differed

from its predecessors in a number of important ways. First, it was the only one of the Reconstruction Amendments and remains the only part of the entire Constitution to focus explicitly on race. In addition, the amendment became the first provision of the Constitution to limit the power of the state governments to establish the qualifications for voters in elections …

“This Lawsuit Smacks Of Racism”: Disinformation, Racial Coding,And The 2020 Election, Atiba R. Ellis

Louisiana Law Review

The essay exposes racism in the lawsuit filed by then U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign that led to the 2021 Capitol Insurrection, discusses racial coding and voting rights realism and considers disinformation events and voter fraud myth on racist conduct during the 2020 presidential election.

Voting Rights, Democracy, And The Constitution After January 6, 2021, Paul Finkelman

Louisiana Law Review

The article looks into the history of voter suppression in the U.S. to understand the need for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and examines the current state of voting rights and democratic system of government in various U.S. states after the January 6, 2021 attack at the Capitol Building.

Blocking The Ballot Box: The Republican War On Voting Rights, Brendan Williams

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Article addresses threats to the right to vote that have arisen since 2018, when voter suppression efforts were key to denying Stacey Abrams, the Black Democratic nominee, victory over Republican Brian Kemp in the Georgia gubernatorial race, while Kemp, in administering his own election while Georgia’s Secretary of State, “laid out a chilling blueprint of voting suppression for other states to follow.”

This Article begins by examining the early Republican voter intimidation tactics that resulted in a consent decree, as these can be viewed as part of a continuum to the present day. It discusses the two U.S. Supreme …

Rising Up Without Pushing Down: Lessons Learned From The Suffragettes' Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric, Kit Johnson

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” Yet when suffragettes spoke of “all” men and women, they were clear about exceptions. Immigrants did not qualify. Indeed, in her own address at the First Women’s Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, Stanton said that “to have . . . ignorant foreigners . . . fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to the dignity of woman …

Gender, Voting Rights, And The Nineteenth Amendment, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

One hundred years after the woman suffrage amendment became part of the United States Constitution, a federal court has held—for the first time—that a plaintiff must establish intentional discrimination to prevail on a direct constitutional claim under the Nineteenth Amendment. In adopting that threshold standard, the court simply reasoned by strict textual analogy to the Fifteenth Amendment and asserted that “there is no reason to read the Nineteenth Amendment differently from the Fifteenth Amendment.” This paper’s thesis is that, to the contrary, the Nineteenth Amendment is deserving of judicial analysis independent of the Fifteenth Amendment because it has a distinct …