Testimonial Incapacity and Criminal Defendants in the South

highlights the tensions between the demands of modern law and white supremacy by studying the rights of convicted criminals in court. Many southern states, for racial and partisan ends, used criminal convictions to strip convicts of their right to testify on their own behalf in court. While states in the rest of the country had revoked such limitations on courtroom testimony by the late nineteenth century, southern states maintained them. They served as an extension of Jim Crow laws, used to deny African Americans full citizenship, much as felon disenfranchisement laws did.

CONTAINING THE RAINBOW COALITION

The emergence of an African American and Latino-dominated coalition with the potential to reconfigure American government and politics at the national, state, and local levels is one of the most noteworthy developments in U.S. politics over the past two decades. Racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement are impediments to this coalition’s political power. Social scientists, legal scholars, and activists have long paid attention to how devices like poll taxes, English competency tests, voter intimidation, racial gerrymandering, and voter identification laws restrict participation and diluted the political influence of racial and ethnic minorities. This essay seeks to direct renewed scholarly attention to racialized mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement as similar devices for suppressing and containing minority group political power.

FEDERALISM, SUBSIDIARITY, AND VOTING RIGHTS: CRITIQUING THE SHELBY COUNTY DECISION THROUGH JOHANNES ALTHUSIUS AND CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING

This article develops a legal and theological critique of the Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder decision that dismantled portions of the Voting Rights Act. Defending the Voting Rights Act in light of four basic features of voting rights—access, participation, empowerment, and expression of conscience—I refute the Shelby decision in terms of its oversimplified notions of discrimination and its overly narrow construal of federalism as state sovereignty and equality. I draw upon Catholic social teaching's subsidiarity and Johannes Althusius's federalism to defend the individual and communal dimensions of voting rights. I examine post-Shelby developments, including voter-identification laws, and I argue that such laws are unfounded and have deleterious effects. I conclude by offering modest recommendations for a post-Shelby world, including continued roles for Congress and the Department of Justice, the use of intermediary organizations, and the rescinding of felon disenfranchisement laws.