Prisoner Enfranchisement in Ireland

I was surprised to learn recently from an Irish law professor that Ireland gave its prisoners the right to vote in 2006. Felon disenfranchisement is such a pervasive fact of life in the United States that many Americans might assume, as I did, that this is the accepted practice everywhere. This turns out not to be the case. Ireland is hardly alone, even among the common-law countries, in giving prisoners the right to vote, although the case of Ireland may be unusual in that its legislature acted in the absence of a court directive. Canada and South Africa, by contrast, required court rulings before their prisoners were enfranchised. The Irish story is nicely recounted in an article by Cormac Behan and Ian O’Donnell: “Prisoners, Politics and the Polls: Enfranchisement and the Burden of Responsibility,” 48 Brit. J. Criminology 319 (2008).

Before proceeding with the Irish story, a little on the American situation:  

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Lighting Out for the Territories

Judge James Doty
Judge James Doty
This is the second in a series of Schoone Fellowship Field Notes.

Territorial judges: an overlooked force in American law. As Willard Hurst observed, during the past 150 years lawyers have been implementers rather than creators of law. We whose days are spent staring at a screen and poring over paperwork sometimes wish we could take a way-back machine to the days of legal creationism, if only for a little while. Yet an important group of creators—judges appointed from Washington, starting in the 1780s, to establish the law in America’s far-flung, largely unsettled new territories—are nearly forgotten today. Territorial judges were often, in the words of the French observer Achille Murat, “the refuse of other tribunals” or seekers after sinecures, and if they are remembered at all it is as much for their escapades as for their jurisprudence. But some of the territorial judges, including Wisconsin’s James Doty, stand out in American political and legal history, and the vital contributions they made to institutionalizing American law are often overlooked. The book being written under the Schoone Fellowship’s auspices will attempt to remedy that.

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Paul Taylor: A Positive Look at Big Changes in America’s Population and Sociology

The title of Paul Taylor’s recent book refers to “a looming generational showdown” as America changes. But Taylor, a senior fellow at the Pew Research Center in Washington, didn’t strike a particularly ominous tone as he described what lies ahead during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday.

There were three reasons for that. First, Taylor described himself as “a glass half-full guy,” generally inclined to be optimistic. Second, he said America has dealt successfully with many challenges in its history. And third, he said the foremost challenge – how a big surge in Social Security and Medicare benefits for retirees will be supported by the workforce of a few years from now – can be handled successfully if Congress and the president are willing to do so.

In his book, “The Next America: Boomers, Millenials and the Looming Generational Showdown,” and in his conversation in the Appellate Courtroom, Taylor gave a wide-ranging, insightful, and occasionally light-hearted tour of big changes in the demographics of America.

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