Richard W. Bourne has posted Richardson v. Ramirez: A Motion to Reconsider (forthcoming Valparaiso University Law Review). Here is the abstract:

In Richardson v. Ramirez, 418 U.S. 24 (1974), the Supreme Court held that Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment authorized states to disenfranchise convicted felons. The decision thus leads to the anomalous result that, although Section 2 was clearly aimed at discouraging discriminatory denial of participation in the political process to African Americans, the provision nevertheless actually provides the primary justification for state statutes disproportionately denying African Americans the right to vote. This article argues that the Court got it very wrong in Richardson. Charles Sumner, one of the leaders of the Radical Republicans in the Congress that drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, argued that the amendment should pursue a political agenda of “inclusion and exclusion,” by which he meant including former slaves in the larger political community while at the same time denying the franchise to whites who had participated in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. The Court in Richardson erred by ignoring the context in which the amendment was drafted and passed as well as specific parts of the legislative history of the amendment that demonstrate that the language recognizing state power to disenfranchise “felons” actually meant to include only those who had committed crimes of rebellion against the Union.

Michael Halberstam has posted Institutionalizing Voting Rights. Here is the abstract:

This article intervenes in the debate about the institutionalization of civil rights. It contrasts the institutionalization and implementation of two distinct voting rights regimes, focusing on the extent to which they have satisfied the democratic value of decentralization and captured the benefits of localism. The article compares the Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) preclearance provision (requiring localities to seek approval for all voting changes with the Justice Department) and the standards for qualitative vote dilution that emerged under Section 2 of the VRA, with the one-person/one-vote rule handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964). The article challenges the conventional view that the VRA constituted an especially egregious assault on the local autonomy of states and covered jurisdictions, sets forth in detail how the relevant provisions of the VRA – but not the one-person/one-vote rule – captured the gains of localism, and situates these findings theoretically in contemporary theory and Supreme Court jurisprudence.