Interesting post from Seth Masket on the real-world consequences of suggesting “Harris lost because she’s a woman” without evidence.

“Unless we’re really 100% sure Kamala Harris lost because she was a woman — and that, by extension, the Democratic Party should be wary of ever nominating a woman for president again — we should be extremely reticent to push this argument publicly. . . . It tells women that they shouldn’t run, and it tells party leaders that they shouldn’t nominate women. It affects what the pool of candidates in 2026 and 2028 will look like and which of them can best get party support. It’s not just idle chatter.”

Looking forward to this, from the Georgetown Center for the Constitution:

To register, please click the “register” button on the top right of the page or fill out the following form. 

Hosted by the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and cosponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society.

Together with the Supreme Court Historical Society, the Center sponsors the annual Salmon P. Chase Distinguished Lecture and Faculty Colloquium to commemorate important anniversaries and neglected figures in our constitutional history. On Thursday evening April 22nd, 2021, Professor Martha Jones of Johns Hopkins University will be delivering the Seventh Annual Salmon P. Chase Distinguished Lecture commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment. The event will be held virtually. Our previous Chase lecturers have included James Oakes, Eric Foner, Colleen Sheehan, William Ewald, Charles McCurdy, and Sandy Levinson.

This event looks good:

Details:

As our nation mourns the loss of Justice Ginsburg—a stalwart champion for gender equality and voting rights—we continue to mark the 100^th anniversary of the ratification of the 19^th Amendment, which prohibits the federal government and the states from denying or abridging the right to vote “on account of sex.”  What role does the 19^th Amendment play in the arc of constitutional progress?  For whom was this amendment’s promise illusory?  What have the 19^th Amendment’s effects been on the health and vitality of our democracy?  And as we prepare for the historic election in November and future elections, what more needs to be done to ensure that the right to vote exists not only on paper, but in the lived reality of women across the nation?  These questions and more will be answered in an online event on Thursday, October 1^st, from 5-6pm ET, featuring a keynote address by Catherine E. Lhamon, Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and then a panel conversation featuring the following experts:

Elizabeth Wydra, President, Constitutional Accountability Center

Jocelyn Frye, Senior Fellow, Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress, and former Policy Director for First Lady Michelle Obama.

The conversation will be moderated by CAC Vice President Praveen Fernandes.

Arkansas Times:

A lawsuit was filed in federal court today to ensure that the expected surge of absentee ballots in November doesn’t lead to mass disqualifications of ballots because of the election day signature check and inability of voters to correct minor errors.

David Gans:

A century ago, the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, prohibiting state-sponsored voting discrimination on account of sex, and women’s status as equal citizens was formally etched in the Constitution’s text.  What is less well known is that the Nineteenth Amendment also helped cement the idea that the right to vote is a fundamental right inherent in citizenship.   

For America’s first 150 years, the exclusion of half the population from participation in the electorate stood firmly in the way of viewing the right to vote as a fundamental right.  When, in the wake of Civil War, the Constitution was first amended to protect the right to vote, it drew a sharp line between men and women.  All citizens did not have a fundamental right to vote.  After all, women were citizens and, as Reconstruction congressmen repeatedly argued, [w]omen do not vote.”  Although a “woman is as much a citizen as a man,” when it came to the right to vote, the Reconstruction Framers took the view that states “may still discriminate.”  In short, instead of being a fundamental right, voting was viewed as a privilege that could be given to men and denied to women, who were deemed to be represented by men “at the polls and in the affairs of Government.” 

Indeed, in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly wrote this cramped view of democracy into the Constitution by imposing a penalty of reduced congressional representation on states that denied or abridged the right to vote to any of its “male” citizens.  In 1870, at the very moment when the Fifteenth Amendment first recognized that the right to vote was necessary to make real the promise of freedom and equal citizenship for Black men, our national charter underscored that women had no claim to the ballot and could be relegated to second-class status.  The Reconstruction Framers, time and again, took it as a given that women would be indirectly represented by their “fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons to whom the right of suffrage is given.”   

Women’s rights activists of the 1860s and 1870s, however, rejected the idea that our foundational promises of democracy, freedom, and equality were real if half the population could be excluded from voting…

You can watch here, with a great lineup:

August 18th marks the one hundredth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote. Join us for a conversation as we reflect on this landmark legislation and how the struggle for voting rights and protections still resonates in 2020. This discussion is hosted by UCLA Law Dean Jennifer Mnookin and features: Ellen DuBois – Professor Emeritus, UCLA History Department

Kathay Feng – National Redistricting Director, Common Cause

Celinda Lake – President, Lake Research Partners

Celinda Vázquez – Vice President of Public Affairs, Planned Parenthood Los Angeles

Sonni Waknin – Managing Legal Fellow, UCLA Voting Rights Project

Important supplement in the New York Times.

Table of Contents:

Nineteenth Amendment Edition

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief
Grace Paras

Foreword

Foreword
Hon. M. Margaret McKeown

Transcript

Excerpted Transcript of “Searching for Equality: The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond”
A conversation between United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge M. Margaret McKeown

Articles

Thin and Thick Conceptions of the Nineteenth Amendment Right to Vote and Congress’s Power to Enforce It
Richard L. Hasen & Leah M. Litman

Reconstructing Liberty, Equality, and Marriage: The Missing Nineteenth Amendment Argument
Nan D. Hunter

The “Welfare Queen” Goes to the Polls: Race-Based Fractures in Gender Politics and Opportunities for Intersectional Coalitions
Catherine Powell & Camille Gear Rich

The Pregnant Citizen, from Suffrage to the Present
Reva B. Siegel

You can download it at this link. When the full symposium issue on the 19th Amendment posts, I’ll provide a link to that as well.

Elizabeth Katz has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Akron Law Review). Here is the abstract:

In recognition of the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, this essay provides an introduction to a largely overlooked yet essential component of the women’s movement: the pursuit of women’s legal right to hold public office. From the mid-nineteenth century through ratification of the federal suffrage amendment in 1920, women demanded access to appointed and elected positions, ranging from notary public to mayor. Because the legal right to hold office had literal and symbolic connections to the right to vote, suffragists and antisuffragists were deeply invested in the outcome. Courts and legislatures varied in their responses, with those in the Midwest and West generally more willing than those in the Northeast and South to construe or create law permitting women to hold office. This account centers on the experiences of Nellie G. Robinson, a pioneering woman lawyer whose efforts to secure public office in Ohio received nationwide attention in the years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. To contextualize Robinson’s successes and failures, the essay expands to consider the parallel efforts of other women lawyers from the period, as well as the broader history of women’s officeholding in Ohio—a state with laws and politics reflecting the major trends and tensions in the national women’s officeholding movement.

This essay was written for a symposium issue of the Akron Law Review, organized with the Center for Constitutional Law. The topic for the conference and symposium was “The 19th Amendment at 100: From the Vote to Gender Equality.”