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On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz
On Overreaching, Or Why Rick Perry May Save The Voting Rights Act But Destroy Affirmative Action, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
The State of Texas is presently staking out two positions that are not typically pursued by a single litigant. On the one hand, Texas is seeking the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, and, on the other, the State is now defending the validity of the expansive race-based affirmative action policy it uses at its flagship university. This Essay presses the claim that Texas has increased the chance it will lose in bothTexas v. Holder andFisher v. University of Texas because it has opted to stake out markedly extreme positions in each. I argue that Texas would be more likely …
Note, Making Ballot Initiatives Work: Some Assembly Required, Portia Pedro
Note, Making Ballot Initiatives Work: Some Assembly Required, Portia Pedro
Faculty Scholarship
For over one hundred years, the ballot initiative or proposition has been touted as a solution to some of the problems in the representative system of democracy in the United States. Depending on a state’s ballot initiative system, this mechanism enables citizens to make laws, to create or eliminate rights, or to amend the state’s constitution through a popular vote. Popular initiatives were initially intended to allow ordinary citizens to intervene in the democratic process when their representative officials were not carrying out their wishes. These proposition processes were supposed to create a space for public deliberation. By allowing the …