Seminar in Voting Rights

On May 17, 1957, Martin Luther King, Jr., exhorted President Eisenhower and members of Congress to give [African Americans] the right to vote. This was our most urgent request. How do we make sense of his plea in light of the 15th Amendment, ratified by the states in 1870 and professing to guarantee to all Americans the right to vote irrespective of race or color? This is the question at the heart of our seminar. Rather than a triumphalist story, the history of the right to vote in the United States is much more complicated than we often recognize. It ebbs and flows. The course begins at the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and the choices made about our democratic structure and ends with Wisconsin and its recent political gerrymandering case, Gill v. Whitford. The course is framed over the overarching question whether the Supreme Court or any other institution should play a leading role in this difficult area. The seminar will appeal to students interested in legal history, constitutional theory, political science, Democratic theory, and constitutional law.