Blog

The American Civil Rights Project, a national civil rights organization, is investigating on behalf of shareholders the officers and directors of Coca Cola Company (NYSE: KO) for breaches of fiduciary duties.

Is all racism equally bad or does racial discrimination’s moral status turn on who is (mis)treating whom?  We can learn from the literature on bullying why the first must be right.

For a generation, state and local governments have faced a Goldilocks problem when they redistrict. Courts require them to use race to design districts in order to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, but they invalidate maps under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when racial considerations “predominated” in the drawing of districts. Seemingly every approach state and local governments have taken to try to draw districts that would comply with these dueling requirements leaves them in the crosshairs of plaintiffs and the federal judiciary: ignoring race entirely, following bright-line concentration rules established by Supreme Court precedents to assure protected classes’ voting power, deferring to the requests presented by representatives of protected classes, deferring to the decisions of nominally non-partisan redistricting panels, and more. There is also an obvious disconnect between voting reformers’ complaints about our current redistricting systems and those reformers’ proposed solutions. Almost no proposal on offer would solve these problems, and almost every proposal on the table would actually make them worse. Indeed, even the remedies imposed by courts have been attacked in later litigation as violating one or both of Goldilocks’ warring demands. But there is a solution to the Goldilocks problem. State and local governments can avoid further redistricting litigation under both the Constitution and Section 2 by simply getting out of the game and drawing no districts whatsoever. This piece originally ran, along with a response from Kevin St. John and a reply from the author, in The Federalist Society Review, Vol. 21.

The furthest advanced effort of the California legislature to allocate opportunities on the basis of group identities has got to be the statutes (two passed in the last three years) to amend the state’s Corporations Code to dictate whom stockholders can elect as their directors. These allocations have been challenged in state and federal court, and -- should it survive those initial suits -- additional claims will surely follow. This piece originally ran on the blog of the Civil Rights Practice Group of the Federalist Society.

Things happen slow and then fast. It took almost a century for Congress, and President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964, putting America back on the side of defending the equality before the law of all U.S. Citizens. Then, it took less than a year (less than a week after an intervening atrocity) for President Johnson to call Congress to the special session that would produce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This piece originally ran as part of a Constituting America program on American history. This piece originally

For a decade after the Civil War, the federal government sought to make good its promises and protect the rights of the liberated as American citizens.  Most critically, in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Congress created U.S. Citizenship and, in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Congress guaranteed all American Citizens access to all public accommodations. Then, stretching from 1877 to the end of the century following the close of the Civil War, the federal government did nothing to assure that those rights were respected. Eventually, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court started to admit that this was a problem, a clear failure to abide by our Constitution. But the Supreme Court (in Brown II) also made clear that it wouldn’t do anything about it. So things stood, until a bad man in high office made it his business to get the federal government again on the side of right, equality, and law. That man was Lyndon Baines Johnson. And while this story could be told in fascinating, exhaustive detail, these are its broad outlines. This piece originally ran as part of a Constituting America program on American history.

You can count on one hand the number of Supreme Court decisions that normal people can identify by name and subject. Brown is one of them (and, arguably, both the widest and most accurately known). And it’s place in the public mind is well-deserved, even if it should be adjusted to reflect more accurately its place in modern American history. This piece originally ran as part of a Constituting America program on American history.