Looking forward to reading this piece from Travis Crum (forthcoming, Yale Law Journal). Here is the abstract:

In the legal histories of Reconstruction, the Fifteenth Amendment’s drafting and ratification is an afterthought compared to the Fourteenth Amendment. This oversight is perplexing given that the Fifteenth Amendment ushered in a brief period of multi-racial democracy and laid the constitutional foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This Article helps to complete the historical record and provides a thorough accounting of the Fifteenth Amendment’s text, history, and purpose.

This Article situates the Fifteenth Amendment within the broad array of constitutional provisions, federal statutes, fundamental conditions, and state laws that enfranchised—and disenfranchised—Black men during Reconstruction. This Article then performs a deep dive into the congressional debate, cataloguing every version of the Amendment that was voted on. It next turns to the ratification debate, an intense partisan affair that culminated in Congress compelling four Southern States’ ratification as part of their re-admission to the Union.

Rather than answer today’s doctrinal questions, this Article’s focus is on the issues debated by the ratifying generation. The Reconstruction Framers were united in their goal of enfranchising Black men nationwide, but they were deeply divided over how best to achieve that goal and whether other disenfranchised groups—such as women, Irish Americans, and Chinese immigrants—should be covered by the Amendment as well. In addition, the Reconstruction Framers debated whether and how the Amendment could be circumvented and whether officeholding should be explicitly protected.

This Article argues that the Fifteenth Amendment’s original understanding went beyond forbidding facially discriminatory voting qualifications; it also prohibited the use of racial proxies and, albeit less clearly, protected the right to hold office. But more fundamentally, the Fifteenth Amendment rejected the original Constitution’s theory of democracy, which delegated to States the authority to decide who deserved the franchise based on whether they had a sufficient stake in the community or their interests were virtually represented. In short, the Fifteenth Amendment is the first constitutional provision that embraced the idea that the right to vote is preservative of all other rights.

Sarah Haan has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Southern California Law Review). Here is the abstract:

Political voting rights have become the subject of sharp legal wrangling in American elections, and the focus of headlines and popular debate. Less attention has focused on American corporate elections, where something similar has been happening: the last two decades have witnessed significant unsettling of basic shareholder voting rights, including laws and practices that were mostly stable throughout the twentieth century. Today, shareholder voting rights are in flux and, increasingly, in controversy. This Article connects the current moment of instability to the last significant era of change in shareholder voting rights—the nineteenth century—and brings historical context to a new era of dynamic change.

A small but potent literature has explored the historical evolution of nineteenth-century shareholder voting rights in corporate law, establishing that per-share vote allocations changed significantly over that century. This literature, which focuses on the shift from “democratic” vote allocations (one-person-one-vote and restricted voting) to “plutocratic” voting (one-share-one-vote), has treated vote allocations as the exclusive determinant of shareholder voting power. The literature has raised as many questions as it has answered, and ultimately has failed to produce agreement among scholars, or a cohesive narrative to explain how or why the modern framework for shareholder voting rights emerged.

This Article presents an alternative account of transformations in shareholder voting rights that tracks three evolving sets of legal rules. It shows how the voting-rights framework that was cemented by the end of the century—the framework that would go on to define twentieth-century corporate control—was determined by the interrelation of the three. One regulated the shareholder’s right to delegate votes (proxy voting), another set per-share vote allocations, and a third addressed the shareholder’s right to aggregate votes (cumulative voting). The Article shows why these three sets of rights must be understood as coactive and interdependent. It contributes new ideas to the longstanding debate about why American corporate law shifted to the rule of one-share-one-vote, and concludes by returning to the present moment, arguing that shareholder voting rights have become newly unsettled through shifts along these same fault lines.

I am pleased to share the recipients of the AALS Section on Election Law’s annual awards ahead of the annual meeting next week. (For a list of past award recipients, see here. If you are a law professor who is not already on the listserv to receive these announcements, please join the Section here!) I am immensely grateful to the volunteers who helped with these selection processes.

The John Hart Ely Prize in the Law of Democracy

This award is presented to a senior scholar in our field for his or her “extraordinary lifetime contributions to the study of election law and the law of democracy in the United States.”

This year’s recipient is Pam Karlan (Stanford).

Distinguished Scholarship Award

The Distinguished Scholarship Award in Election Law is awarded for “a single work that exemplifies excellence in the field and that is published within a given year.” The term “work” is defined broadly.

Winner: Tabatha Abu El-Haj – How The Liberal First Amendment Under-Protects Democracy

Honorable Mention: Bertrall Ross and Doug Spencer – Voter Data, Democratic Inequality, and the Risk of Political Violence