I have written this post for The Monkey Cage at WaPo.  It begins:

In a Winston-Salem, N.C. federal courthouse, closing arguments are taking place this morning in a hotly-contested trial over North Carolina’s restrictive voting law. The U.S. Department of Justice and civil rights groups say that the 2013 law, passed by a Republican legislature over the objections of Democrats, violates the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. The state defends its law as necessary to prevent voter fraud and keep public confidence in the electoral process.

As the New York Times explained, “The contested measures reduced early voting days, ended same-day registration, ended out-of-precinct voting and halted the preregistration of 16- and 17-year-old high school students. These measures had been adopted in the past 15 years to increase voter participation and were disproportionately used by black, Hispanic and younger voters.”

Since the Voting Rights Act passed 50 years ago — on Aug. 6, 1965 — there have been many legal disputes over the extent of court protection for minority voting. The outcome of this one, like many cases before it, may depend upon how well murky law matches up with political science evidence.

It concludes:

Judge Schroeder could well be faced with a situation where plaintiffs have trouble proving the law will have a large discriminatory effect on African-American voters, but also ample evidence that North Carolina had no good reason antifraud or voter confidence reason for passing this law. The law was probably intended to help Republicans — who are overwhelmingly supported by white voters and not African-Americans in North Carolina — stay in office.

With this evidence and a murky legal standard, it is unclear what Judge Schroeder will do, but he was skeptical of plaintiffs’ case at an earlier stage of the case, denying a preliminary injunction against some of these practices.

Whatever Judge Schroeder decides, the North Carolina case could well end up before the Supreme Court. And if the history of the Supreme Court’s cases over 50 years of the Voting Rights Act is any guide, the fate of North Carolina’s law may depend less upon the political science evidence before the Court and more on the Justices’ ideological commitments and beliefs about the appropriate scope of voting protections for minorities.