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Full-Text Articles in Law
Unfinished Business: Protecting Voting Rights In The Twenty-First Century, Gilda R. Daniels
Unfinished Business: Protecting Voting Rights In The Twenty-First Century, Gilda R. Daniels
All Faculty Scholarship
While minorities have experienced great progress because of the Voting Rights Act, particularly section 5 of the Act, the work to achieve an electoral process free of discrimination remains unfinished. In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down section 4 of the Act, which provided the coverage formula through which section 5 was implemented. Without section 4, there is no section 5. The historical and contemporaneous discrimination that minorities in states formerly covered under section 5 continue to face is substantial and outpaces that in noncovered states. Scholars cannot divorce the debate surrounding section 5’s constitutionality, which continues …
The Anomaly Of Executions: The Cruel And Unusual Punishments Clause In The 21st Century, John Bessler
The Anomaly Of Executions: The Cruel And Unusual Punishments Clause In The 21st Century, John Bessler
All Faculty Scholarship
This Article describes the anomaly of executions in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. While the Supreme Court routinely reads the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause to protect prisoners from harm, the Court simultaneously interprets the Eighth Amendment to allow inmates to be executed. Corporal punishments short of death have long been abandoned in America’s penal system, yet executions — at least in a few locales, heavily concentrated in the South — persist. This Article, which seeks a principled and much more consistent interpretation of the Eighth Amendment, argues that executions should be declared unconstitutional as …