Taking (Equal Voting) Rights Seriously: The Fifteenth Amendment as Constitutional Foundation, and the Need For Judges to Remodel Their Approach to Age Discrimination in Political Rights

Abstract

This Essay explores the relationship between twentieth-century voting-discrimination amendments and the Fifteenth Amendment’s anti-discrimination groundwork on which these later developments built. In particular, it examines ways in which the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, whose text and ratification conversations tightly track those of the Fifteenth Amendment, has been under-implemented, if not completely ignored, in important recent debates and cases that are ever-more crucial to the meaning of political-rights equality under the Constitution. It ends by urging courts to take more seriously the similarities between the Twenty-Sixth and Fifteenth Amendments in adjudicating disputes involving facial or de facto age discrimination in political rights realms.

Draft of article forthcoming in Volume 97 of the Notre Dame Law Review, 2022. All rights reserved. Please do not cite or quote without permission.