Law Commons^™

The Regulatory Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Public Law As Cultural Memory, Robin Kundis Craig

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirements for six states’ voting laws, and many of those states almost immediately enacted new voting restrictions, that disparately affected citizens of color. In the 1980s and 1990s, Congress deregulated financial markets, including dismantling protections that had been in place since the New Deal, allowing firms to introduce new forms of derivatives — and systemic risk — into the economy, leading to 2008’s housing crisis. In the early 21st century, state legislatures increasingly enacted exemptions from state vaccination requirements that allowed parents to skip their children’s vaccinations, …