Announcement via email:

The Section on Election Law at AALS is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2020 Distinguished Scholarship Award in Election Law. The winners will be honored at the section’s annual panel on Wednesday, January 6th, from 11:00 am to 12:15 pm and again individually at the section’s networking event on Thursday, January 7th, from 12:15 to 1:15 pm.
Congratulations to each of the winners.

Winner: Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Disparate Impact, Unified Law, 128 Yale L.J. 1566 (2019).
From the judges:  “Stephanopoulos’s provocative article suggests that courts should treat vote denial claims brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act using the same disparate impact analysis that they use to resolve employment discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and housing discrimination claims under the Fair Housing Act. This proposal cuts against recent developments in lower courts that find a Section 2 violation only when an electoral practice produces a disparate racial impact through its interaction with prior social and historical discrimination. While there is much to be said for the traditional approach normatively, Stephanopoulos highlights a series of complications and uncertainties in its application. Significantly, he emphasizes how it leads to decisions in which all election practices that produce a racially disparate impact are impermissible, a result, Stephanopoulos argues, that stands in tension with current constitutional doctrine. By contrast, employing a unified approach to disparate impact analysis across different statutory schemes would allow some practices to be upheld and others struck down by more modestly shifting the burden to the states to justify why their racially discriminatory practices are needed in the first place. Stephanopoulos makes his case for the unification of disparate impact law on both practical and normative grounds in a comprehensive, mature piece of scholarship that combines strong and insightful large-scale thinking with careful doctrinal analysis, and in the end offers a proposal that is both novel and elegant. The article is masterful in its breadth and was a pleasure to read.” 

Honorable Mention:Justin Levitt. Citizenship and the Census, 119 Colum. L. Rev. 1355 (2019).
From the judges: “Levitt’s article presents a clear-eyed view of the Census Bureau’s decision to request information about the citizenship status of Census respondents in 2020. This article was as careful as it was timely, as it was written not long before the Supreme Court validated Levitt’s observation that the rationale for adding a citizenship question to the Census was contrived. Levitt’s article lays out in detail why adding a citizenship question is unnecessary for VRA enforcement, explores how such a question might shift political representation and power in American politics, and outlines how it could backfire in those states that most strongly support adding the citizenship question. Levitt’s careful analysis draws the reader’s attention to the various ways in which our technocratic statistical infrastructure has been weaponized in the fight for political representation. The end result is a first-rate article that masterfully illustrates how the minutiae of bureaucratic protocol contributes to democratic backsliding ” 

Honorable Mention:Joshua S. Sellers & Erin A. Scharff, Preempting Politics: State Power and Local Democracy, 72 Stan. L. Rev. 1361 (2020).
From the judges: “Joshua Sellers and Erin Scharff’s article examines the scope that local authorities have to determine the structure of their local political institutions in the face of potentially preemptive state legislation. Such conflicts – concerning issues such as the size of local councils, whether certain officials are elected or appointed, over the timing of elections and whether they are held on a partisan or nonpartisan basis, and about campaign finance rules, voting methods, and voter eligibility – frequently arise  and have significant implications for the working of local democracy. However, they have received relatively little scholarly treatment. Sellers and Scharff provide a careful and thoughtful analysis of the values that should be considered in these ‘structural preemption disputes’ and show how these values can be brought to bear in analyzing specific cases. Their treatment goes beyond assuming a preference for one level of government or the other and instead emphasizes the importance of focusing on the implications of the particular rule for political participation and democratic accountability. This thorough, well-written article contributes a great deal to our knowledge of preemption.”   

Congrats all!