The Voting Rights Act and the New and Improved Intent Test: Old Wine in New Bottles

Since the Supreme Court injected the issue of intent into the voting rights arena in Mobile v. Bolden,1 there has been a long and persistent struggle to reverse that decision. In 1982, Congress thought it had put the question of the quantum and quality of proof required to establish a violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to rest when Congress amended that section. However, the courts quickly began a rear guard action to undermine congressional efforts to eliminate the intent requirement as an element of a plaintiff\u27s claim. Both the Supreme Court and the circuit courts have played various roles in the effort to re-assert the intent test in, albeit, a “new and improved” form. Despite Congress\u27 best efforts, the intent test is back. The role of scholars and practitioners is to understand the new test and determine how to satisfy this most stringent requirement. In this article, the contours of the new test will be examined and the question of what proof is required to satisfy the test will be explored. Part II will discuss the Mobile decision and congressional efforts to eliminate the intent test from section 2. Part III will explore the several opinions in Thornburg where the question of the intent of Congress when it amended section 2 was discussed. Finally, in Part IV, the circuit court decisions, essentially adopting Justice O\u27Connor\u27s opinion, will be analyzed to determine the contours of the new intent test and the elements of proof required to meet it. This article concludes that the courts “got it wrong” when they reintroduced the intent standard, and that Congress intended to banish intent as a requirement of a plaintiff\u27s case. However, recognizing that practitioners must live with what is, and not what ought to be, the article theorizes that the new test is not as difficult to prove as the old intent test

The Unification of Germany: What Would Jhering Say?

Two of Jhering\u27s ideas are crucial to understanding the problems besetting the merger of East and West Germany. They are (a) the centrality of the notion of private property as the foundation, not only of property rights, but of personal rights as well; and (b) his notion of rechtsgefühl, translated clumsily as a feeling of legal right, but implying the pain and irritation a person feels when he has been put upon. [FN8] It is my thesis that a fundamental difference between the way these two concepts are viewed in the former East and West Germanies is a sword in the bed, presenting a fierce obstacle to the union that both desire

The Unification of Germany: What Would Jhering Say?

Two of Jhering\u27s ideas are crucial to understanding the problems besetting the merger of East and West Germany. They are (a) the centrality of the notion of private property as the foundation, not only of property rights, but of personal rights as well; and (b) his notion of rechtsgefühl, translated clumsily as a feeling of legal right, but implying the pain and irritation a person feels when he has been put upon. [FN8] It is my thesis that a fundamental difference between the way these two concepts are viewed in the former East and West Germanies is a sword in the bed, presenting a fierce obstacle to the union that both desire

Calculations, and comparison with an ideal minimum, of trimmed drag for conventional and canard configurations having various levels of static stability

Classical drag equations were used to calculate total and induced drag and ratios of stabilizer lift to wing lift for a variety of conventional and canard configurations. The Flight efficiencies of such configurations that are trimmed in pitch and have various values of static margin are evaluated. Classical calculation methods are compared with more modern lifting surface theory

A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin

Pulsar surveys offer one of the few opportunities to monitor even a small fraction (~0.00001) of the radio sky for impulsive burst-like events with millisecond durations. In analysis of archival survey data, we have discovered a 30-Jy dispersed burst of duration <5 ms located three degrees from the Small Magellanic Cloud. The burst properties argue against a physical association with our Galaxy or the Small Magellanic Cloud. Current models for the free electron content in the Universe imply a distance to the burst of <1 Gpc No further bursts are seen in 90-hr of additional observations, implying that it was a singular event such as a supernova or coalescence of relativistic objects. Hundreds of similar events could occur every day and act as insightful cosmological probes.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures. Accepted by Science. Published electronically via Science Express on September 27, 200