Current Issue

Volume 64, Summer 2012, Issue 4

Speeches

PROTECTING THE RIGHT TO VOTE: THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT A HALF CENTURY LATER, WHERE ARE WE AND WHAT CHALLENGES REMAIN
The Honorable Gary Stein

The Voting Rights Act, and particularly section 5, may be the most successful civil rights enactment in our Nation’s history. The power of section 5 is that it prevents discriminatory election laws from taking effect without preclearance by the Justice Department or a federal court. Absent section 5, such laws could be challenged under section 2 of the Act; but that litigation would be expensive and time consuming, and pending the outcome, the law would be in effect. That is why the invalidation of section 5 is being pursued so vigorously.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE’S ENFORCEMENT OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT
Thomas Perez

Recently, I had the opportunity to travel with Attorney General Eric Holder to Austin, Texas, where he delivered an address on voting rights at the LBJ Library. I had a chance to reflect on LBJ’s legacy. The Attorney General often calls the Civil Rights Division one of the crown jewels of the Department of Justice. The crown jewels are actually the laws that we enforce, and Lyndon B. Johnson was the person who brought us so many of these jewels.

Articles

THE FUTURE OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT
J. Gerald Hebert

On March 7, 1965, a few hundred civil rights activists set out to the road from Selma, Alabama, marching for voting rights. Their planned journey of fifty miles to the state capital in Montgomery ended only a few blocks later, when they were turned back at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge by Alabama state troopers.

SWORD, SHIELD, AND COMPASS: THE USES AND MISUSES OF RACIALLY POLARIZED VOTING STUDIES IN VOTING RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT
Kareem U. Crayton

The persistence of racially polarized voting (“RPV”), in legal and scholarly circles, is viewed as a social ill that must be rendered ineffective or eliminated entirely in public life. Among the primary legal tools used to pursue this end are the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution and various federal antidiscrimination statutes, including the Voting Rights Act (the “Act” or “VRA”).

THE PAST AS PROLOGUE: DEFENDING DEMOCRACY AGAINST VOTER SUPPRESSION TACTICS ON THE EVE OF THE 2012 ELECTIONS
Ryan P. Haygood

We are experiencing an assault on voting rights that is historic both in terms of its scope and intensity. In the last two years, fifteen states passed twenty-six restrictive voting measures that threaten to disproportionately harm voters of color. As many as five million eligible voters are in danger of not being able to register and/or cast a ballot this November.