Voting Rights
Democracy’s Distrust: The Supreme Court’s Anti-Voter Decisions as a Threat to Democracy
“Democracy’s Distrust” explores how the Supreme Court has eroded voting rights and weakened democracy. It argues that the Court prioritizes candidates and legislatures over voters, fostering public distrust. The Essay examines historical and contemporary cases, highlighting the need for legislative reforms and civic action to protect democracy.
The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U.S. Election Law
This Feature describes the stagnation and retrogression of election-law doctrine, politics, and theory, explains why these trends have emerged, and explores how to transform election law in a pro-voter direction. This pro-voter approach is grounded in political equality, engaging legal doctrine, political action, and scholarship to further five principles.
After Suffrage: The Unfinished Business of Feminist Legal Advocacy
This Essay chronicles Pauli Murray’s intersectional feminist legal advocacy, which transformed post-suffrage women’s citizenship and continues to shape an ambitious and urgent agenda for universal enfranchisement in the Nineteenth Amendment’s second century.
Lessons from the Suffrage Movement in Iran
The women’s suffrage movement in Iran achieved the vote in 1963, several decades after women in the United States. The challenges and opportunities in Iranian women’s fight for equal rights offer insight into the complex and often fraught politics of calling for women’s rights and participation in a non-Western context.
The Nineteenth Amendment and the Democratization of the Family
Women’s claim to vote advanced a broader effort to democratize the family. This Essay recovers debates over the family connecting the Reconstruction Amendments and the Nineteenth Amendment, and considers how this lost history might guide the Constitution’s interpretation in courts and politics today.
Fighting Back to Protect Student Voting Rights
Relying on the author’s experiences as a Yale Law Journal Fellow, this Essay looks at direct and indirect obstacles faced by college students seeking to vote on campus. It explores and proposes legal avenues and advocacy efforts that can be used to successfully overcome these obstacles.
The Predominance Test: A Judicially Manageable Compactness Standard for Redistricting
Most states require compact legislative districts, but courts have no framework to judge when contorted districts are legally suspect. This Essay proposes a “Predominance Test” that limits the most egregious gerrymanders by comparing challenged maps to maximally compact plans to test whether compactness predominates over lower-tier and discretionary criteria.
Disparate Impact, Unified Law
Lower federal courts have recently converged on a two-part test for vote denial claims under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Yet this status quo is doctrinally incoherent and constitutionally vulnerable. Courts, this Article contends, should look to disparate impact law to address these problems and preserve section 2.
A Post-Shelby Strategy: Exposing Discriminatory Intent in Voting Rights Litigation
In the wake of Shelby County, voting rights lawyers have pushed to hold jurisdictions fully accountable for their actions by proving claims of intentional discrimination under Section 3 of the VRA. This Essay explores the importance of this strategic move in the latest generation of voting rights cases.
Building an Umbrella in a Rainstorm: The New Vote Denial Litigation Since Shelby County
This Essay traces the post-Shelby County development of a two-part Section 2 vote denial liability test. It also describes the tension as to the necessity of evidence (1) regarding the effect of voting practices on voter turnout and (2) concerning discriminatory intent on the part of a state actor.
Vote Dissociation
The 2016 election highlighted deep-seated problems in American democracy that voting rights cannot fix. This Essay employs the term “vote dissociation” to refer to a species of voting rights injury that is qualitatively different from both vote denial and vote dilution, in which concentrated wealth translates into political power.