Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU Law School. The Supreme Court has struggled between seeing itself as an institution that only vindicates individual rights and as one that vindicates, at times, more structural or group-based interests.
Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU Law. In 2014, he argued predecessor case Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama on behalf of the appellants, and he continues to represent those plaintiffs.
Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU. As soon as the Court decided to hear Evenwel, a barely suppressed anger emerged in many quarters, on grounds of both process and substance.
I have recently come to the view that one of the most profound and pervasive issues beneath the surface of most cases in constitutional and public law is how the Court approaches the task of evaluating the actions of other institutions of government.
As my title indicates, that is the way to understand the Court’s opinion Monday in the relatively low-visibility case Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States, about who owns rights-of-way the government granted railroad companies, to facilitate railroad construction in the nineteenth century, when a company abandons those rights.
I have called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) a “sacred symbol” of American democracy. For that reason, the Supreme Court’s momentous decision holding unconstitutional a part of the Act – Section 4, for short — that had continued to apply, nearly fifty years later, uniquely to the South, is itself laden with deep symbolic meaning.
The following contribution to our online VRA symposium comes from Richard H. Pildes, Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law.