ACLU Attorney Says Tighter Voting Rules “Not Healthy” for Democracy

There was a sea change in the approach to election issues across America in the late 2000s, as Dale Ho sees it. He isn’t sure what the cause was, but he is sure it wasn’t a good development. Ho is director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project, which makes him one of the leaders of legal opposition nationwide to tightening the rules on who can vote.

Ho told an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Eckstein Hall on Wednesday that voting rights issues had largely drawn bipartisan support for decades.

“We had thought we had largely achieved a consensus in this country around universal suffrage, basic access for everyone (to voting),” Ho said. “Most of the debates about voting rights since the early 1970s were about redistricting – are the lines being drawn fairly for every community, are they being gerrymandered for partisan reasons, things like that. The trend remained toward greater liberalization in terms of ballot access. We didn’t see a lot of fights about registration and ballot access. .  . .

“In the late 2000s, something changed.”

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Stanley Kutler, American Legal Historian

Stanley KutlerThe obituaries for Stanley Kutler, a retired University of Wisconsin professor who passed away on April 7, tended to stress Kutler’s large role in obtaining public access to the Nixon Watergate tapes. Only 63 hours of those tapes had been released before Kutler’s lawsuit against the National Archives and Records Administration, but his efforts resulted in the release of more than 3,000 additional hours. Kutler and other scholars were then able to use material on the tapes to detail the Nixon Administration’s frequent and sometimes shocking abuses of political power.

Unfortunately, the obituaries largely overlooked Kutler’s decades of extraordinary work as a legal historian. His numerous books and articles include Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics (1969), Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (1971), and American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (1984). All of these works explored specific cases in the context of broader historical movements. The facts and social complexities of the cases were always more important for Kutler than were the rules and corollaries spouted from one appellate bench or another.

Kutler’s work as a legal historian placed him at the center of the “new legal history” that emerged during the 1960s.

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Israel Reflections 2015: Day 7 — The Rabin Center

On the beginning of day seven of our trip (our last day!!), we visited the Rabin Center museum.  This museum commemorates the life and career of late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin through telling the story of Israeli history.  And the view from the Center over Tel Aviv (pictured below) cannot be beat!

Student William Nash shares his personal reaction to the Rabin museum:

“We began our last day in Israel by visiting the Rabin Center Museum in Tel Aviv. It was a nice morning—warm, with an easy, steady breeze. Standing out on the balcony, we overlooked the rabin-centerTel Aviv skyline beaming just beneath the prominence of the late-morning Mediterranean sun. It was a picture of peace. But at the time I didn’t appreciate the profound character and meaning of the ambiance. To me, it was a reprieve from constant bustle of the trip. And it was the perfect opportunity to take some last-minute pictures.

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