Voting Rights Act Of 1965: Summary And Analysis

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 vote in Shelby County v. Holder to strike down two main provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). The first, Section 4(b), contained the coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions are subject to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting. Section 5, which was rendered invalid by proxy, was the actual provision that required certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing new voting laws and practices. Votes in this case were clearly divided among ideological lines, and there were fundamental differences in the interpretation of the law relative to the case at hand and the issue of racism and discrimination at large. Using a legal realist approach to jurisprudence forwarded by Jerome Frank in “Law and the Modern Mind”, this paper will explore both the majority ruling and …show more content…
Frank believed they did. “Law and the Modern Mind” begins with a rejection of what Frank called the “basic myth”, the traditional conception of (natural) law as certain, definite, nicely calculated, and exact (Frank ix). A primary component of this myth was the commonly believed conviction that judges should not make law, and any attempts to do so usurped legislative power (32). This pervasive fiction, he states, arises from a subjective need to believe in “stable, approximately unalterable law” that pre-exists judicial decisions and retroactively prevails (32, 35) And he believed that judges fooled both themselves and the public into believing this, despite the contrary manifesting every day in rulings across the country. Frank believed the very job of judge entailed correcting for oversights in previous decisions, or vindicating old law form misinterpretations in order to adapt to the ways of changing society, and this idea can effectively explain both the majority and minority opinions in Shelby County v.