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Full-Text Articles in Law
Resurrecting The White Primary, Ellen D. Katz
Resurrecting The White Primary, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
An unprecedented number of noncompetitive or "safe" electoral districts operate in the United States today. Noncompetitive districts elect officials with more extreme political views and foster more polarized legislatures than do competitive districts. More fundamentally, they inhibit meaningful political participation. That is because participating in an election that is decided before it begins is an empty exercise. Voting in a competitive election is not, even though a single vote will virtually never decide the outcome. What a competitive election offers to each voter is the opportunity to be the coveted swing voter, the one whose support candidates most seek, the …
Reinforcing Representation: Enforcing The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Amendments In The Rehnquist And Waite Courts, Ellen D. Katz
Reinforcing Representation: Enforcing The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Amendments In The Rehnquist And Waite Courts, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
A large body of academic scholarship accuses the Rehnquist Court of "undoing the Second Reconstruction," just as the Waite Court has long been blamed for facilitating the end of the First. This critique captures much of what is meant by those generally charging the Rehnquist Court with "conservative judicial activism." It posits that the present Court wants to dismantle decades' worth of federal antidiscrimination measures that are aimed at the "reconstruction" of public and private relationships at the local level. It sees the Waite Court as having similarly nullified the civil-rights initiatives enacted by Congress following the Civil War to …
Morgan Kousser's Noble Dream, Heather K. Gerken
Morgan Kousser's Noble Dream, Heather K. Gerken
Michigan Law Review
J. Morgan Kousser, professor of history and social science at the California Institute of Technology, is an unusual academic. He enjoys the respect of two quite different groups - historians and civil rights litigators. As a historian, Kousser has written a number of important works on the American South in the tradition of his mentor, C. Vann Woodward, including a foundational book on southern political history, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. Many of his writings have become seminal texts among election law scholars. Kousser has also used his historical skills …
Race And The Right To Vote After Rice V. Cayetano, Ellen D. Katz
Race And The Right To Vote After Rice V. Cayetano, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
Last Term, the Supreme Court relied on Gomillion [v. Lightfoot] to hold that Hawaii, like Alabama before it, had segregated voters by race in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. The state law at issue in Rice v. Cayetano provided that only "Hawaiians" could vote for the trustees of the state's Office of Hawaiian Affairs ("OHA"), a public agency that oversees programs designed to benefit the State's native people. Rice holds that restricting the OHA electorate to descendants of the 1778 inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands embodied a racial classification that effectively "fenc[ed] out whole classes of ...ci tizens from decisionmaking …
Can Minority Voting Rights Survive Miller V. Johnson, Laughlin Mcdonald
Can Minority Voting Rights Survive Miller V. Johnson, Laughlin Mcdonald
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Part I of this Article reviews the congressional redistricting process in Georgia, particularly the State's efforts to comply with the Voting Rights Act and avoid the dilution of minority voting strength. Part II describes the plaintiffs' constitutional challenge and the State's asserted defenses, or more accurately its lack of asserted defenses. Part III argues that the decision of the majority rests upon wholly false assumptions about the colorblindness of the political process and the harm caused by remedial redistricting. Part IV notes the expansion in Miller of the cause of action first recognized in Shaw v. Reno. Part V …
Effective Representation And Multimember Districts, Michigan Law Review
Effective Representation And Multimember Districts, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
The Supreme Court has not decided a case involving an assertion of the claim that a multimember district denies the right of effective representation since Fortson and Burns. However, there have been several subsequent challenges in lower courts to the validity of such districts, and these challenges have generally failed because the factual evidence did not demonstrate conclusively that the voting strength of a legally cognizable racial or political element had been minimized or cancelled. In Chavis v. Whitcomb, however, a three-judge federal district court in Indiana found that the plaintiff had presented sufficient factual evidence to sustain …
Katzenbach V. Morgan And The 18 Year Old Vote, E. Rick Buell Ii
Katzenbach V. Morgan And The 18 Year Old Vote, E. Rick Buell Ii
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Recently the 91st Congress passed the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970. The provisions of the statute include Title III which extended the right of suffrage to eighteen year old citizens in all federal, state, and local elections. The basis for enacting Title III was the belief of Congress that citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, by being denied the right to vote, were being denied equal protection of the laws as required by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The purpose of this note is to briefly trace the historical development of Congress' power to …
Constitutional Law--Equal Protection--Property Ownership Qualifications On The Right To Vote In Special Municipal Elections--Cipriano V. City Of Houma, Michigan Law Review
Constitutional Law--Equal Protection--Property Ownership Qualifications On The Right To Vote In Special Municipal Elections--Cipriano V. City Of Houma, Michigan Law Review
Michigan Law Review
Plaintiff, a resident of Houma, Louisiana, who owned no real property, brought a class action seeking to prevent the city from issuing utility revenue bonds approved by a vote of the property taxpayers at a special election. He argued that the Louisiana statute restricting the right to vote in such elections to property owners was unconstitutional. Plaintiff relied on Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, in which the Supreme Court declared that Virginia's required payment of poll taxes for voting in general elections was a violation of the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Harper, he claimed, …
Some Comments On The Reapportionment Cases, Paul G. Kauper
Some Comments On The Reapportionment Cases, Paul G. Kauper
Michigan Law Review
Any appraisal of the Supreme Court's decisions in the legislative reapportionment cases must necessarily distinguish between the basic policy ingredients and social consequences of the decisions on the one hand, and the question whether the results were reached by a proper exercise of judicial power on the other. Respecting the first of these considerations, I have no difficulty identifying the social advantages accruing from these decisions. Because of the stress on the population principle, the decisions will afford a greater voice to urban interests, will make the legislative process more responsive to current needs of particular concern to urban dwellers, …
Political Thickets And Crazy Quilts: Reapportionment And Equal Protection, Robert B. Mckay
Political Thickets And Crazy Quilts: Reapportionment And Equal Protection, Robert B. Mckay
Michigan Law Review
If asked to identify the two most important cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in the twentieth century, informed observers would be likely to name, in whichever order, Brown v. Board of Education and Baker v. Carr.
The Administraton's Anti-Literacy Test Bill: Wholly Constitutional But Wholly Inadequate, William W. Van Alstyne
The Administraton's Anti-Literacy Test Bill: Wholly Constitutional But Wholly Inadequate, William W. Van Alstyne
Michigan Law Review
The nature of American national government has undergone a profound metamorphosis, moving from the near oligarchy which characterized the system as established in 1789 to the imperfectly representative government which it is today. At the time the Constitution was ratified, all restrictions then imposed by the several states on the right to vote for state and federal electors were preserved. These various limitations on the franchise restricted the active body politic to approximately four percent of the total population. Disfranchisement applied then, as now, to those under twenty-one, to those lacking sufficient residence in a given community, to the insane, …