Samuel Issacharoff
Samuel Issacharoff, professor of law at the New York University School of Law, is author most recently of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts.
Recent Articles
How the Voting Rights Act, Great as It Was, Ultimately Fell Short
The fight for voting rights hasn’t been the straightforward battle we once might have expected to win and be done with.
Nov 17, 2015
This book review appears in the Fall 2015 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America By Ari Berman 384 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux $28.00 On March 7, 1965, John Lewis helped lead protesters on the historic march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Lewis walked side by side with Hosea Williams until the marchers were set upon by Alabama state troopers. The infamous Bloody Sunday assault left Lewis with a fractured skull, one of dozens of civil-rights protesters injured for demanding the constitutional right to vote. Bloody Sunday was also the precipitating event for the well-chronicled efforts to enact a voting rights act that merited the name. Exactly 50 years later, Lewis returned to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge once more. Now marching as a 15-term incumbent congressman from Georgia, Lewis walked hand in hand with Barack Obama. Nothing at that commemoration could have better...
