39 Pamela Karlan – Defending Voting Rights In The 21st Century

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When the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department called Pamela Karlan. The Stanford law professor had devoted her career to voting rights, working for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and arguing three voting rights cases before the Supreme Court. As a scholar, she co-wrote one of the definitive casebooks about voting rights nearly two decades ago. Now, she would move to the policy world, to help develop a response to a historic rollback of the civil rights-era law.

Almost immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision invalidated a protective provision of the 1965 act—determining which states had to get preclearance to change their voting laws—Texas began enforcing one of the country’s strictest voter ID laws, and North Carolina enacted a range of restrictions. DOJ sued both states. With the preclearance provision no longer at their disposal, Karlan and her new team were left to rethink how to argue voting rights cases based on a more general anti-discrimination provision of the act. The question, essentially, was how to prove whether the Texas and North Carolina laws had either a discriminatory effect or purpose—or both.