The secrecy of jury deliberations is foundational to our entire jury system … or so we are told. In theory, the secrecy allows jurors to speak their minds and vote their consciences. These upsides of jury secrecy are so important that it is broadly believed, as one court put it, that opening the door to deliberations would “destroy the jury system itself.” It is no surprise, then, that every state and the federal government has an evidentiary rule that prevents the piercing of deliberations.

This chapter explains the principle of equivalence in medical rights between prisoners and the free public and argues that MAID will be authorized for prisoners on the grounds that depriving them of this option is unconstitutional.

From the founding era to the turn of the twentieth century, Congress has at times asserted its power over elections robustly and creatively, even in periods of judicial obstruction, and its role in shaping the nation’s electoral landscape has always been pivotal – even when contested, uneven, or ineffective. This period invokes a rich and overlooked history that reveals a repository of federal authority over elections that was triggered (or ignored) less for reasons of federalism, and more so due to pragmatic, principled, or partisan considerations.

This book examines the dynamic and politically consequential relationship between US Supreme Court rulings and public opinion. It argues that the ideological alignment between the Court and the public is a critical, yet fluctuating, feature of American politics. Using the period surrounding Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and the Court’s subsequent rightward shift as a central case study, the analysis explores how and when the Court moves in and out of step with public sentiment, with the 2022 Dobbs decision serving as a pivotal example of an unpopular ruling that triggered significant backlash. The book introduces an innovative methodology, leveraging annual surveys from 2020 to 2024 that directly compare public preferences with the issues in cases before the Court. Key findings reveal that while the Court’s rulings shifted sharply out of line with the average American after 2020, they later moved back toward closer alignment. This was achieved not through ideological moderation but through mechanisms like docket selection, where the Court took up cases in which the conservative outcome was popular. This study demonstrates that the Court’s relationship with public opinion is a fast-moving dynamic that shapes judicial legitimacy, public backlash, and the Court’s strategic behavior.

Violent uprisings across the South, from the Colfax Massacre of the 1870s to the Wilmington Insurrection of the 1890s, further complicated Congress’s already precarious standing on issues related to voting and elections, especially given its ongoing war with a Supreme Court intent on limiting congressional power. In addition, the controversy surrounding the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, which would have instituted federal supervision of congressional elections, revealed that there were political risks attendant to legislating toward the outer limits of constitutional power to empower and protect Black voters, risks that tended to manifest at the ballot box. Republican support for the bill cost them a significant number of congressional seats in the 1890 and 1892 elections. Instead of becoming a moment in which a revitalized Congress used the Constitutions of Political Structure and Political Rights to ensure that African Americans would be permanent fixtures in the political community of “We the Voters,” politics guaranteed that they would remain transient and temporary visitors.

With Reconstruction in its death throes, Congress sporadically used its power under Article I, Section 5, to review the elections of its members and, in the process, police racial discrimination in voting, even though much of the disenfranchisement written in law was ostensibly race neutral. As illustrated in Chapter 9, Congress fought back against these disenfranchising regimes, which were adopted across the South over the course of the 1890s and set the tone for the exclusion of Black voters from American politics for almost a century. Congress’s efforts during this period bring this book back to a reoccurring theme: that political limitations, rather than constitutional constraints like federalism, were more of a barrier to the broad implementation of federal power over elections.

Racial reckoning should only address material racial inequality, not mere claims of hypothetical constitutional injury. This chapter defines racial inequality in measurable, visible terms and shows how Blacks experience disadvantage in institutional environments. Place, or residency, determines the access to resources that flow from key institutions like schools, neighborhoods and social capital networks. Place has a leveraging effect, amplifying advantages for some and compounding disadvantage for others. Less visible, race-neutral means perpetuate racially segregated places. The chapter shows how conservative constitutional doctrine conspicuously ignores these mechanics of inequality, and produces empirically bizarre results like the Supreme Court’s 2023 anti-affirmative action opinion about getting into Harvard. Colorblind antidiscrimination law offers a radical view of equality at odds with lived reality and core principles of racial equity, which reproduces more inequality.

This chapter provides an introduction to the core concepts of US law, for those with an HCI background but not a legal background. The chapter covers the history of U.S. law, the basic constructs of the U.S. legal system, the core sources of legal rules: constitutions, statutues, regulations, and case law, differences between civil and criminal law, the differences between law and policy at the federal versus state level, searching for and using legal resources, and how to apply basic legal principles to HCI research.

The Indian constitution was poised to create a new map of power, transforming the relationship between existing state agencies and new authorities. This chapter demonstrates how the individuals staffing the state apparatus were not mere spectators, passively following the constitution-making process, but actors who actively sought to influence, change, or resist the emerging constitutional order through both public and private channels. The success of the future constitution of India required a smooth transition of the organs of the colonial state to the postcolonial order. Turning their loyalty and ambitions to the new state and its constitutional order was not an obvious outcome in 1947. The chapter examines how provincial legislators sought to guard their autonomy; how the higher judiciary endeavoured to protect their judicial independence; the contested constitutional status of Delhi; and finally, how the ‘neutral’ bureaucracy who were managing the process of constitution making actively sought to defend their own jurisdiction and interests at the time. This process, which paralleled the integration of territories, led to the functional integration of the units of the state.

Joseph Story thought that the United States needed more than courts to vindicate its independence in the War of 1812. The youngest justice on the Supreme Court also believed that the nation needed legal doctrines that would support its aspirations to global power. For decades, American policymakers – and especially the Court under John Marshall – had defended the rights of neutral nations to trade peaceably in wartime. That approach made sense when a militarily weak but commercially vigorous United States sought to profit from trade with European powers embroiled in conflict. But now that the United States itself was at war, Story envisioned a different national future, in which a robust military and strong central government were the foundation of American sovereignty. The split that emerged on the Court over neutral and belligerent rights reflected a generational divide over how to preserve and extend American independence, and it fractured the Marshall Court’s prior unanimity. Despite Marshall’s resistance, Story persuaded his colleagues to adopt doctrines that favored the rights of nations at war, pushing the courts – and the country – to assume a more assertive presence at sea.