On May 23, the Supreme Court issued its opinion upholding a South Carolina congressional map against a challenge from the NAACP. In Alexander v South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, the Court found that the South Carolina legislature had conducted a partisan gerrymander, permissible under the Court’s precedents, and not an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In this episode, two leading election and voting rights scholars, Joshua Douglas of the University of Kentucky College of Law, and Derek Muller of the University of Notre Dame Law School, join Jeffrey Rosen to discuss the Alexander v. NAACP majority opinion, as well as the concurrence and dissent, and review what this decision means for the future of racial gerrymandering cases.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Greg Scheckler and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Joshua Douglas is Ashland, Inc.-Spears Distinguished Research Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law. He is the author of Vote for US: How to Take Back our Elections and Change the Future of Voting, and co-author of an election law case book. His newest book is The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights.
Derek Muller is a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School and a nationally recognized scholar in the field of election law. He has published over two dozen articles and book chapters on elections, voting rights and election administration, and has co-written a Federal Courts casebook (2022). He is also a contributor at the Election Law Blog.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources:
- Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP (2024)
- Joshua Douglas, The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights (2024)
- Joshua Douglas, "Today's Supreme Court is Anti-Voter," Washington Monthly (May 28, 2024)
- Derek Muller, "The Long Shadow of the Elections Clause" Election Law Blog (May 29, 2024)
- Derek Muller, "Faith in Elections," 36 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Poly 641 (2022)
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