Law Commons^™

The Superfluous Fifteenth Amendment?, Travis Crum

Northwestern University Law Review

This Article starts a conversation about reorienting voting rights doctrine toward the Fifteenth Amendment. In advancing this claim, I explore an unappreciated debate—the “Article V debate”—in the Fortieth Congress about whether nationwide black suffrage could and should be achieved through a statute, a constitutional amendment, or both. As the first significant post-ratification discussion of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Article V debate provides valuable insights about the original public understandings of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the distinction between civil and political rights.

The Article V debate reveals that the Radical Republicans’ initial proposal for nationwide black suffrage included both …

Qualified Immunity's Selection Effects, Joanna C. Schwartz

Northwestern University Law Review

The Supreme Court has described the “driving force” behind qualified immunity to be its power to dismiss “insubstantial” cases before discovery and trial. Yet in a prior study of 1,183 Section 1983 cases filed against law enforcement in five federal court districts around the country, I found that just seven (0.6%) were dismissed at the motion to dismiss stage and just thirty-one (2.6%) were dismissed at summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds. These findings undermine assumptions about the role qualified immunity plays in filed cases, but leave open the possibility that qualified immunity serves its intended role by screening out …