The Voting Rights Act has radically altered the political status of minority voters and dramatically transformed the partisan structure of American politics. Given the political and racial salience of cases brought under the Act, it is surprising that the growing literature on the effects of a judge’s ideology and race on judicial decisionmaking has overlooked these cases. This Article provides the first systematic evidence that judicial ideology and race are closely related to findings of liability in voting rights cases.

This empirical study examines for the first time how the criminal system in the United States handled the cases of people who were subsequently found innocent through postconviction DNA testing. The data collected tell the story of this unique group of exonerees, starting with their criminal trials, moving through levels of direct appeals and habeas corpus review, and ending with their eventual exonerations. Beginning with the trials of these exonerees, this study examines the leading types of evidence supporting their wrongful convictions, which were erroneous eyewitness identifications, forensic evidence, informant testimony, and false confessions. This Article's findings all demonstrate how our criminal system failed to effectively review unreliable factual evidence, and, as a result, misjudged innocence.

The traditional law and finance focus on agency costs presumes that the premise that diversified public shareholders are the cheapest risk bearers is immutable. In this Essay, we raise the possibility that changes in the capital markets have called this premise into question, drawn into sharp relief by the recent private equity wave in which the size and range of public companies being taken private expanded significantly. In brief, we argue that private owners, in increasingly complete markets, can transfer risk in discrete slices to counterparties who, in turn, can manage or otherwise diversify away those risks they choose to forego, arguably becoming a lower cost substitute for traditional risk capital.

Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA) in response to a deluge of inmate litigation and judicial micromanagement of penal institutions. Among other things, the Act limited injunctive relief in prison conditions cases to the minimum required by federal law. This change set Eighth Amendment cases apart from other constitutional violations by imposing special restrictions on equitable remedies. This Note argues against hemming in courts’ ability to correct Eighth Amendment violations. Drawing on the work of Professor Jeremy Waldron, this Note points out that the Eighth Amendment shares with laws against torture a respect for human dignity that distinguishes legal from other types of force.

Perhaps no constitutional provision is as controversial as the electoral college. Much of the controversy has stemmed over the possibility that the college has the potential to produce a so-called “wrong winner”—-that is a President who has not won the national popular vote. When this happened for the fourth time in the 2000 presidential election, opponents of the college created a plan to avoid the cumbersome constitutional amendment process and end the electoral college through an interstate compact that would ensure that the winner of the national popular vote would become President. This Note argues that this plan, while certainly clever, may run afoul of another deeply contested area of law—-sections 2 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act—-as either minority vote dilution or retrogression in the ability of minority voters to elect the candidate of their choice.