Section 5, the most controversial part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, requires that every “covered jurisdiction,” mostly counties and states in the Deep South, submit all changes in election laws to the U.S. Department of Justice or the District Court of the District of Columbia before putting them into effect. Renewed by Congress overwhelmingly in 2006, it is now under attack in a case that will almost certainly be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Mukasey. “The Strange, Ironic Career of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2007" (http://www.hss.caltech.edu/%7Ekousser/racial%20discrimination/Strange%20and%20Ironic%20Career,%20as%20printed.pdf) 86 TEXAS LAW REVIEW 668 (2008) is the first comprehensive overview of the history of that section. One hundred and eight pages long, it covers not only legal cases, but also the administrative and legislative history of the provision. Drawing on interpretative frameworks for the history of race relations developed by my mentor, C. Vann Woodward, the paper argues that from even before its inception, the history of Section 5 has been complicated, contradictory, and ironic, not simple, straightforward, and inevitable, as it is often presented. Like Woodward’s work, this paper is meant not only to analyze the past, but to help frame the future – in this instance, to prepare to amend the Act if the Supreme Court should weaken or overturn it.
"Has California Gone Colorblind?" (http://www.hss.caltech.edu/%7Ekousser/redistricting/Has%20California%20Gone%20Colorblind.pdf) in Frederick Douzet, Thad Kousser, and Kenneth P. Miller, eds., The New Political Geography of California (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 2008), 267-90 examines every primary and general election contest for Congress and the state legislature from 1994 through 2000 to explain why the number of Latino Democrats elected grew over the period and to determine what the partisan and racial composition of election districts must be to elect candidates of choice of the Latino community in contemporary California. It shows that the key index is the Latino percentage of the Democratic registration, and that to give Latinos a fair opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, one should draw districts in which the Latino percentage of Democrats is above forty percent and is at least ten percentage points higher than any other group. Growing out of my work for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund during the 2001 redistricting in California, the paper is relevant not only to an issue of general concern to political scientists and the public, but of specific concern in the North Carolina case, Bartlett v. Strickland, that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Fall of 2008.
I am currently heavily revising three previously published papers on the struggle against racial discrimination in public schools in nineteenth century America and finishing a fourth paper, all for publication in a book contracted to Cambridge University Press.
Last updated: March 20, 2009 14:38
