Registration is required. Zoom link will be sent before the day of the event. Please join Professor Mary Bilder and Professor Dan Farbman as they welcome Franita Tolson, Vice Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at USC Gould School of Law, to discuss her forthcoming book and the election. Following the discussion will be a Q&A session. Free and open to the public.
--Dan Ernst
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| Lonnie Smith Votes in 1944 Primary |
[We have the following announcement. DRE.]
The University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) pleased to announce a new exhibit titled “Black Voters, White Primaries." Using case files from the papers of Supreme Court Justice Stanley Forman Reed, as well as other archival materials from the collections, the exhibit explores how Smith v. Allwright (1944) helped end the “white primary," a voter suppression tool that served as the first line of attack—and often the only one needed—to prevent Black Americans from voting in the Jim Crow South. BONUS: UK Rosenberg College of Law Professor Josh Douglas weighs in on voter suppression this election season.
The exhibit was created as part of UK’s John G. Heyburn II Initiative for Excellence in the Federal Judiciary, a non-partisan endeavor devoted to the preservation and study of federal judicial history, with a particular focus on Kentuckians in the federal courts.
Credit for image: “Courtesy University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center”
New on “Talking Legal History” with Siobhan M. M. Barco is her interview of Charles L. Zelden
–Dan Ernst"about the new expanded edition of his book, Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Growing Crisis in American Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2020). Zelden is a professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Nova Southeastern University’s Halmos College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches courses in history, government and legal studies.
"In this third expanded edition Zelden offers a powerful history of voting rights and elections in America since 2000. Bush v. Gore exposes the growing crisis by detailing the numerous ways in which the unlearned and wrongly learned “lessons of 2000” have impacted American election law through the growth of voter suppression via legislation and administrative rulings, and, provides a clear warning of how unchecked partisanship arising out of Bush v. Gore threatens to undermine American democracy in general and the 2020 election in particular."
[We have the following announcement. DRE]
Since the U.S. Supreme Court held in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering claims are non-justiciable under the U.S. Constitution, reformers have shifted their focus to pursuing such claims under state constitutions. In some cases, longstanding state constitutional provisions have been re-interpreted to prohibit partisan gerrymandering. In others, state constitutions have been expressly amended to either forbid partisan gerrymandering or transfer authority over drawing congressional and legislative district lines from the state legislature to independent redistricting commissions.–Dan Ernst
The U.S. Constitution does not confer authority to regulate federal elections on states as entities, however, but rather specifically on the “Legislature” of each state. The “independent state legislature doctrine” teaches that a state constitution is legally incapable of imposing substantive restrictions on the authority over federal elections that the U.S. Constitution confers directly and specifically on a state’s legislature. Over the past 130 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly adopted conflicting positions on the doctrine without recognizing its deep historical roots or normative justifications.
The independent state legislature doctrine reflects the prevailing understanding of states, Congress, and other actors throughout the Nineteenth Century, and was consistently applied during that period across a broad range of circumstances. It protects important structural considerations and is consistent with the political theory underlying the U.S. Constitution’s election-related provisions. Properly understood, the independent state legislature doctrine is a powerful, largely overlooked obstacle to the use of state constitutions to combat partisan gerrymandering.
