Voting Rights Law And Policy In Transition,
2014
Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Voting Rights Law And Policy In Transition, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel E. Charles
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
State's Rights, Last Rites, And Voting Rights,
2014
Indiana University Maurer School of Law
State's Rights, Last Rites, And Voting Rights, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles
Articles by Maurer Faculty
There are two ways to read the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County Alabama v. Holder: as a minimalist decision or as a decision that undermines the basic infrastructure of voting rights policy, law, and jurisprudence. In this Article, we present the case for reading Shelby County as deeply destabilizing. We argue that Shelby County has undermined three assumptions that are foundational to voting rights policy, law, and jurisprudence. First, the Court has generally granted primacy of the federal government over the states. Second, the Court has deferred to Congress particularly where Congress is regulating at the intersection of race …
The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra Preclearance After Shelby County,
2014
University of Connecticut School of Law
The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra Preclearance After Shelby County, Douglas M. Spencer, Christopher S. Elmendorf
Faculty Articles and Papers
The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively enjoined the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act. The Court deemed the coverage formula, which determines the jurisdictions subject to preclearance, insufficiently grounded in current conditions. This Article proposes a new, legally defensible approach to coverage based on between-state differences in the proportion of voting age citizens who subscribe to negative stereotypes about racial minorities and who vote accordingly. The new coverage formula could also account for racially polarized voting and minority population size, but, for constitutional reasons, subjective discrimination by voters is the essential criterion. We demonstrate that …
Rationalizing Voter Suppression: How North Carolina Justified The Nation's Strictest Voting Law,
2014
Scripps College
Rationalizing Voter Suppression: How North Carolina Justified The Nation's Strictest Voting Law, Megan C. Raymond
Scripps Senior Theses
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in instances of Republican-dominated state legislatures proposing changes to election law that some see as protecting electoral integrity and others understand as intended to suppress votes of traditionally Democratic constituencies. This thesis is a detailed collection of the rationales used to justify these changes, as examined through a case study of North Carolina’s enactment of the omnibus Voter Information Verification Act of 2013 (VIVA). By also including the arguments proffered during the legislative process by opponents of the law, and after evaluating the merits of the arguments on both sides, I …
Partitioning And Rights: The Supreme Court’S Accidental Jurisprudence Of Democratic Process,
2014
University at Buffalo School of Law
Partitioning And Rights: The Supreme Court’S Accidental Jurisprudence Of Democratic Process, James A. Gardner
Journal Articles
In democracies that allocate to a court responsibility for interpreting and enforcing the constitutional ground rules of democratic politics, the sheer importance of the task would seem to oblige such courts to guide their rulings by developing an account of the nature and prominent features of the constitutional commitment to democracy. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has from the beginning refused to develop a general account – a theory – of how the U.S. Constitution establishes and structures democratic politics. The Court’s diffidence left a vacuum at the heart of its constitutional jurisprudence of democratic process, and like most vacuums, …
Swing State Rulings On Restrictive Voting Laws Highlight The Need For Comprehensive Electoral Reform,
2014
University of Colorado Law School
Swing State Rulings On Restrictive Voting Laws Highlight The Need For Comprehensive Electoral Reform, Michael Lavigne
University of Colorado Law Review
The right to elect our leaders has been one of the defining features of America's political system from its very beginning. Throughout the two and a half centuries that the United States has existed, that right to vote has gradually been expanded to previously disenfranchised groups, and strengthened through legislation like the Voting Rights Act, Help America Vote Act, and National Voter Registration Act. However, recent elections-such as Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004-have shown that the right to vote can still be undermined by incompetent or conflicted officials. Additionally, measures whose purpose is ostensibly to prevent voter fraud, …
The Forgotten Law Of Lobbying,
2014
Fordham University School of Law
The Forgotten Law Of Lobbying, Zephyr Teachout
Faculty Scholarship
For most of American history, until the 1950s, courts treated paid lobbying as a civic wrong, not a protected First Amendment right. Lobbying was presumptively against public policy, and lobbying contracts were not enforced. Paid lobbying threatened the integrity of individuals, legislators, lobbyists, and the integrity of society as a whole. Some states had laws criminalizing lobbying; Georgia had an anti-lobbying provision in its Constitution. Inasmuch as there was a personal right to either petition the government, or share views with officers of the government, this right was not something one could sell -- it was not, in the term …
Neoliberal Political Law,
2014
Fordham University School of Law
Universalism And Civil Rights (With Notes On Voting Rights After Shelby),
2014
University of Michigan Law School
Universalism And Civil Rights (With Notes On Voting Rights After Shelby), Samuel R. Bagenstos
Articles
After the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, voting rights activists proposed a variety of legislative responses. Some proposals sought to move beyond measures that targeted voting discrimination based on race or ethnicity. They instead sought to eliminate certain problematic practices that place too great a burden on voting generally. Responses like these are universalist, because rather than seeking to protect any particular group against discrimination, they formally provide uniform protections to everyone. As Bruce Ackerman shows, voting rights activists confronted a similar set of questions—and at least some of them opted for a universalist approach—during the campaign …
The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra ‘Preclearance’ After Shelby County,
2014
University of California, Davis, School of Law
The Geography Of Racial Stereotyping: Evidence And Implications For Vra ‘Preclearance’ After Shelby County, Christopher S. Elmendorf, Douglas M. Spencer
Publications
The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) effectively enjoined the preclearance regime of the Voting Rights Act. The Court deemed the coverage formula, which determines the jurisdictions subject to preclearance, insufficiently grounded in current conditions. This Article proposes a new, legally defensible approach to coverage based on between-state differences in the proportion of voting age citizens who subscribe to negative stereotypes about racial minorities and who vote accordingly. The new coverage formula could also account for racially polarized voting and minority population size, but, for constitutional reasons, subjective discrimination by voters is the essential criterion. We demonstrate that …
Citizens United, States Divided: An Empirical Analysis Of Independent Political Spending,
2014
University of Colorado Law School
Citizens United, States Divided: An Empirical Analysis Of Independent Political Spending, Douglas M. Spencer, Abby K. Wood
Publications
What effect has Citizens United v. FEC had on independent spending in American politics? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused solely on federal elections, where there is no baseline for comparing changes in spending behavior. We overcome this limitation by examining the effects of Citizens United as a natural experiment on the states. Before Citizens United, about half of the states banned corporate independent expenditures and thus were "treated" by the Supreme Court's decision, which invalidated these state laws. We rely on recently released state-level data to compare spending in "treated" states to spending in the "control" states, …
Three Questions For The Right To Vote Amendment,
2014
Columbia Law School
Three Questions For The Right To Vote Amendment, Richard Briffault
Faculty Scholarship
Should the United States Constitution be amended to guarantee the right to vote? To the average citizen – and probably many lawyers – this almost certainly would be taken as an absurd question. Most people probably assume that the right to vote is, at least in principle, already guaranteed by the Constitution even if our practices fall short of our ideals. But, in fact, although the Constitution frequently refers to the “right … to vote” – and the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence has long treated voting as a fundamental right – the right to vote per se is nowhere guaranteed. A …
Hollowed-Out Democracy,
2014
University of Michigan Law School
Hollowed-Out Democracy, Kate Andrias
Articles
Professors Joseph Fishkin’s and Heather Gerken’s essay for this symposium, The Two Trends That Matter for Party Politics, along with the larger project of which it is a part, marks a notable turn (or return) in the law-of-democracy field. Unlike much recent scholarship, Fishkin’s and Gerken’s work does not offer a comprehensive theory of corruption or equality, but instead analyzes the relationship between campaign finance law and the actual functioning of political parties in our democracy. In brief, Fishkin and Gerken tell us that our contemporary political parties are at once highly polarized and oddly weak. They claim this is …
Corruption Temptation,
2014
Duke Law School
Corruption Temptation, Guy-Uriel Charles
Faculty Scholarship
In response to Professor Lawrence Lessig’s Jorde Lecture, I suggest that corruption is not the proper conceptual vehicle for thinking about the problems that Professor Lessig wants us to think about. I argue that Professor Lessig’s real concern is that, for the vast majority of citizens, wealth presents a significant barrier to political participation in the funding of campaigns. Professor Lessig ought to discuss the wealth problem directly. I conclude with three reasons why the corruption temptation ought to be resisted.
Election Law's Lochnerian Turn,
2014
University of Michigan Law School
Election Law's Lochnerian Turn, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
This panel has been asked to consider whether "the Constitution [is] responsible for electoral dysfunction."' My answer is no. The electoral process undeniably falls well short of our aspirations, but it strikes me that we should look to the Supreme Court for an accounting before blaming the Constitution for the deeply unsatisfactory condition in which we find ourselves.
Voting Rights Law And Policy In Transition,
2014
Duke Law School
Voting Rights Law And Policy In Transition, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Politics And The Public’S Right To Know,
2014
Notre Dame Law School
Politics And The Public’S Right To Know, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer
Journal Articles
In the United States it is taken for granted that members of the public should have access to information about their government. This access takes many forms, including the ability to obtain copies of government documents, the ability to attend meetings of government officials, and the related obligations of government officials to document their activities and to reveal certain otherwise private information about themselves. This access also is often limited by countervailing concerns, such as the privacy of individual citizens and national security. Nevertheless, the presumption both at the federal level and in every state is to provide such access. …
The Geopolitics Of Election Approval: The Us Response To Honduras And Venezuela,
2013
Western New England University School of Law
The Geopolitics Of Election Approval: The Us Response To Honduras And Venezuela, Lauren Carasik, Susan Scott, Azadeh Shahshahani
Media Presence
No abstract provided.
The Incompatible Treatment Of Majorities In Election Law And Deliberative Democracy,
2013
University at Buffalo School of Law
The Incompatible Treatment Of Majorities In Election Law And Deliberative Democracy, James A. Gardner
Journal Articles
Deliberative democracy offers a distinctive and appealing conception of political life, but is it one that might be called into service to guide actual reform of existing election law? This possibility seems remote because election law and deliberative democracy are built around different priorities and theoretical premises. A foundational area of disagreement lies in the treatment of majorities. Election law is structured, at both the legislative and constitutional levels, so as to privilege majorities and systematically to magnify their power, whereas deliberative democracy aims at privileging minorities (or at least de-privileging majorities). The main purpose of the election law now …
Honduras’ Presidential Election Demands An Investigation,
2013
Western New England University School of Law
Honduras’ Presidential Election Demands An Investigation, Lauren Carasik, Azadeh Shahshahani
Media Presence
No abstract provided.
