Skip to main content

Election Law Resources

By

Today is Election Day.  Texas elections have been the focus of national attention following the Supreme Court’s recent decision not to enjoin Texas’ voter identification law while it waits to hear the case on its merits.  Here are some resources that may be of interest to anyone interested in the legal history behind this case, or interested in election law generally as it will affect Houston today:
The law in question, Tex. S.B. 14, 82nd Leg., R.S. (2011), which amends the Texas Election Code to establish voter identification requirements, was challenged by the Department of Justice in Texas v. Holder.  The Supreme Court declined to block the new law before hearing the case, leaving the new identification requirement in effect for today’s voting.  This case follows last year’s Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, where the Court held Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, and is only the latest development in the nearly 50-year history of the Voting Rights Act.
Following these developments, the Department of Justice has announced that it will be monitoring polling places around the country today; Harris County, Texas is one of the locations that will be monitored.  Information about federal observers and election monitoring is available here.
Harris County residents wishing to exercise their right to vote today may find information on ballots, polling places and additional voting resources on an informational website provided by the Harris County Clerk.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

By
Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le
1 comment
Read more

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

By
Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.
Post a Comment
Read more

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

By
This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires
Post a Comment
Read more