Law Commons^™

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 …

The Lawfulness Of The Fifteenth Amendment, Travis Crum

Notre Dame Law Review

One of the most provocative debates in constitutional theory concerns the lawfulness of the Reconstruction Amendments’ adoptions. Scholars have contested whether Article V permits amendments proposed by Congresses that excluded the Southern States and questioned whether those States’ ratifications were obtained through unlawful coercion. Scholars have also teased out differences in how States were counted for purposes of ratifying the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. This debate has focused exclusively on the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, dismissing the Fifteenth Amendment as a mere sequel.

As this Essay demonstrates, the Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification raises unique issues and adds important nuance to this …

Taking (Equal Voting) Rights Seriously: The Fifteenth Amendment As Constitutional Foundation, And The Need For Judges To Remodel Their Approach To Age Discrimination In Political Rights, Vikram D. Amar

Notre Dame Law Review

This Essay explores the relationship between twentieth-century voting-discrimination amendments and the Fifteenth Amendment’s antidiscrimination groundwork on which these later developments built. In particular, it examines ways in which the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, whose text and ratification conversations tightly track those of the Fifteenth Amendment, has been underimplemented, if not completely ignored, in recent debates and cases that are ever-more crucial to the meaning of political-rights equality under the Constitution. It ends by urging courts to take more seriously the similarities between the Twenty-Sixth and Fifteenth Amendments in adjudicating disputes involving facial or de facto age discrimination in political rights realms.