Enfranchising the Disenfranchised
![handle is hein.journals/jlawp9 and id is 257 raw text is: ENFRANCHISING THE DISENFRANCHISED
Mr Still
Welcome to the panel on Enfranchising the Disenfranchised.
I am Edward Still, the director of the Voting Rights Project of the
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
We have what I believe will be an interesting panel today. The
first panelist is Penda Hair, now with the Advancement Project,
and formerly with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund. Penda has been involved in many of the major voting rights
cases during the last ten or fifteen years, including Thornburg v.
Gingles,1 the first case in which the Supreme Court interpreted the
1982 amendments to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Our second panelist is Melissa Saunders, who teaches at the
University of North Carolina and sometimes works as the Senior
Counsel to the North Carolina Attorney General. Melissa has
recently been working on Hunt v. Cromartie, the latest round of the
Shaw v. Reno litigation in North Carolina.2 Because the NAACP
Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF)3 has been involved
478 U.S. 30 (1986).
2 Hunt v. Cromartie, 526 U.S. 541 (1999) [Shaw Ill']. Shaw III involves
the claim that North Carolina's twelfth congressional district, as established by
the State's 1997 congressional redistricting plan, created an unconstitutional racial
gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment. Id. at 544-45. The Court held that the issue of whether a districting
plan is a political or a racial gerrymander is a triable issue of fact, but the Court
made no conclusions on the requisite proof to demonstrate an unconstitutional
gerrymander. Id. at 553-54.
3 LDF, which was founded in 1940 by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall, is the nation's premier civil rights public interest law firm. LDF fights
for equality and empowerment for African Americans and other disenfranchised
groups in the areas of education, employment, criminal justice, voting rights,
housing, health care, and environmental justice. NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, Inc., About the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,
at http://www.ldfla.org/ldf.html (last visited Jan. 26, 2001).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jlawp9&div=30&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Enfranchising the Disenfranchised
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