The Sentencing of Roger Stone: A Federal Prosecutor’s Lament

Remembering Judge Deborah Batts

In 2012, I met a remarkable and inspirational judge named Deborah Batts, at a gala dinner in Chicago, hosted by Just The Beginning Foundation. She sat in the audience while I had the honor of being a recipient of one of the many scholarships the organization provides to diverse law students who are entering law school.

Three years later I would meet Judge Batts again, this time in her chambers in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where I was humbly requesting to serve as a Judicial Law Fellow after my fellowship ended in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals with the honorable Judge Ann Claire Williams, who introduced me to Judge Batts in 2012 at the JTBF gala dinner.

Judge Batts welcomed me with open arms and to this day, both my practice, and my personal life benefit tremendously from my time spent in chambers with Judge Batts. Judge Batts and I had many conversations about our unique backgrounds and what it meant to be courageous and confident despite not being your prototypical anything.

For me, I had overcome a wrongful conviction, made my way through law school, did a fellowship in the same 7th Circuit that reversed my conviction, and was just getting ready to start practicing with the Innocence Project in New York

Judge Batts was the first openly gay judge to sit on the federal bench, confirmed at a time when gay marriage had yet to be accepted by the law. She presided over prominent cases such as the Central Park Five’s civil case during her tenure. And she was the first African-American faculty member at Fordham Law School, where she continued to teach well into her career on the bench.

Judge Batts would often tell me how proud she was that not only did I refuse to give up, but that I didn’t let someone else’s perception of me become my reality, a battle she knew well. Judge Batts shared with me the many challenges and obstacles she met head on throughout her career. Each step of the way Judge Batts displayed unwavering courage, unshakable faith in her own possibilities and those of the world around her. I am truly grateful for each day I spent watching her do just that.

When I left Judge Batts’s chambers in July of 2016, I would often buzz the doors of her chambers to say hello when I was at the federal courthouse. The last time I buzzed the door to Judge Batts chambers, I was told by her current clerk that she had just left to head to the gym.

In hindsight, I dearly regret not waiting until she got back from the gym to thank her one more time for the many ways she has and continues to inspire me. However, it is comforting to know that at the age of 72, Judge Batts never stopped working to get stronger.

With love, respect and my deepest condolences to Judge Batts's family and loved ones.

Mass Surveillance and Black Legal History

By whatever name – “mass surveillance,” the “surveillance state,” the “electronic police state” – the far-reaching efforts by U.S. government institutions to monitor the speech and conduct of individuals in America has entered into the public consciousness. We see evidence and elements of it everywhere. Building cameras. Traffic cameras. Surveillance drones. Facial recognition software. Speech recognition software. Smart TVs. Smart cities. GPS tracking. DNA family matching. NSA. FISA. Surveillance-related concepts and methods such as these are now familiar terms in the American lexicon.

Surveys indicate, however, that most American citizens value their privacy and would be concerned if the government was monitoring their communications.[1] Many who are aware of the present breadth of government-sponsored digital surveillance have a negative reaction, particularly when hearing that the tactic is aimed at U.S. citizens.[2] But although some individuals worry about the government monitoring their online activities, they are more accepting of the practice when it is aimed at identifying and stopping others who may be potential terrorists, government subversives, or dangerous criminals.[3]

Despite the public’s recent rise in recognition, pervasive government surveillance in America is not a new phenomenon. Government monitoring and suppression of Black speech and conduct has been an essential feature of American society far before the public at large realized the potential dangers of widespread surveillance. Although privacy is a national value, it has been an elusive concept for Black people in America.

The foundation for today’s expansive state surveillance system was built upon the lessons learned from America’s history of monitoring Black people in America. As early as the seventeenth century, whites were constantly surveilling Black people.[4] Slaves (and free Blacks) were observed closely in order to detect, prevent, investigate, and prosecute Black misconduct, whether serious or minor. Informants policed a wide variety of behavior, but were especially seen as valuable for the prevention and suppression of organized resistance and rebellions. Slave informants spoiled the infamous rebellions planned by Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser, as well as many other lesser-known plans of resistance.[5] Surveillance continued after Emancipation, when Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws were enacted and used to return many Blacks to another form of slavery – convict labor.[6]

More than 100 years after slavery was officially abolished, whites still sought to suppress and control Blacks and remained especially concerned with Black activism and protest. In the early 1900s, the FBI targeted “race agitators” such as Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Dubois.[7]  It continued the strategy into the 1940s and 1950s when the Civil Rights Movement was in its formative stages. During the height of the Movement, the FBI engaged in widespread surveillance of Black organizations and individuals.[8]  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party were all well-known targets of the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program.[9]  Other subjects included the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and the Black Liberation Army (BLA), as well as the individuals associated with those groups.[10]  Many Black celebrities were also spied upon, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Max Roach.[11]  Using the information it gathered, the FBI fomented dissent, engaged in blackmail and coercion, and policed and prosecuted many Black citizens, destroying in the process numerous lives and organizations. [12]

Like their predecessors in generations before them, modern Black disruptors – whether agitators, activists, or criminals – have been unable to avoid the government’s gaze. After the end of the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements, state and federal law enforcement officials turned their attention to street gangs, which were growing locally, regionally, and nationally. Law enforcement agencies nationwide established gang units and task forces that in turn created paper-based gang databases and relied on street-level informants for information.

Government efforts were not limited to fighting the Wars on Drugs, Crime, and Gangs. As during the Civil Rights Movement, police extended their efforts to Black celebrities, including musical artists considered subversive or dangerous. By the 1980s and 1990s, many well-known political and gangsta’ rappers, including Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, and Tupac Shakur, realized they were being watched by government officials.[13]  This was followed by police agencies in New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Miami forming hip hop task forces in the early 2000s to keep abreast of rap artists’ disputes, criminal histories and activities, and general whereabouts.[14]  These units still exist today. Finally, in the early 2010s, as grassroots Black demonstrations emerged after the killings of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, both state and federal government were again there to watch. Protest and advocacy organizations such as Black Lives Matter and government-labeled “Black Identity Extremists” are being monitored and infiltrated.[15]

If anything today is different from historical Black experiences with government surveillance, it’s that 21st century technology advances have made the practice far easier and more widespread. What was once limited to human, street-level surveillance or wiretaps has expanded to include Black people’s online activities.[16] From social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to content-sharing sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify, law enforcement can watch and listen to whole communities, all from the comfort of their removed, secure offices.[17]  As a result, street gang police units and other intelligence-gathering entities have moved much of their policing online. Today, law enforcement spends substantial resources monitoring the online conversations, activities, and networks of young Black and Latino men, looking for evidence of crimes, sometimes before any crime or real threat has occurred.[18]

Mass surveillance has been a long-standing feature of American criminal justice, albeit a selective practice usually reserved for Blacks. But now, what has been and continues to be a normalized feature of Black people’s lives is becoming commonplace for all Americans. It remains to be seen how American citizens will respond to this new form of governance by the state and vice versa, but it is safe to say that Black people have always been and – at this rate –  will always be under the watchful eye of the state, whether they are on the street or online.

[1] Frank Newport, Americans Disapprove of Government Surveillance Programs, Gallup (June 12, 2013), https://news.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-government-surveillance-programs.aspx.

[2] Lee Rainie and Mary Madden, Americans’ Views on Government Surveillance, Pew Research Center (Mar. 16, 2015), https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/03/16/americans-views-on-government-surveillance-programs/

[3] Id.

[4] Andrea L. Dennis, A Snitch in Time:  An Historical Sketch of Black Informing during Slavery, 97 Marquette Law Review 279 (2013), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2325665

[5] Id.

[6] Shane Bauer, The Origins of Prison Slavery, Slate (Oct. 20, 2018), https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/origin-prison-slavery-shane-bauer-american-prison-excerpt.html.

[7] Nusrat Choudhury & Malkia Cyril, The FBI Won’t Hand Over Its Surveillance Records on ‘Black Identity Extremists,’ so We’re Suing, ACLU (Mar. 21, 2019), https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/race-and-criminal-justice/fbi-wont-hand-over-its-surveillance-records-black.

[8] Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, The FBI’s War on Civil Rights Leaders, The Daily Beast (Apr. 11, 2017), https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-fbis-war-on-civil-rights-leaders.

[9] Id.

[10] James Kirkpatrick Davis, Spying on America: The FBI’s Domestic Counterintelligence Program 117 (Praeger 1992).

[11] Jack Denton, The FBI’s Long, Alarming History of Investigating Black Musicians, Pacific Standard Magazine (Nov. 22, 2017), https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-fbis-long-history-of-investigating-black-musicians.

[12] Ogbar, supra note 7.

[13]  Denton, supra note 10.

[14] Dasun Allah, NYPD Admits to Rap Intelligence Unit, The Village Voice (Mar. 16, 2004), https://www.villagevoice.com/2004/03/16/nypd-admits-to-rap-intelligence-unit/.

[15] George Joseph & Murtaza Hussain, FBI Tracked an Activist Involved with Black Lives Matter As They Traveled Through the U.S., Documents Show, The Intercept (Mar. 19, 2018), https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-surveillance/.

[16] Tim Lau, The Government Is Expanding Its Social Media Surveillance Capabilities, Brennan Center For Justice (May 22, 2019), https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/government-expanding-its-social-media-surveillance-capabilities.

[17] Jonah Engel Bromwich, Daniel Victor & Mike Isaac, Police Use Surveillance Tool to Scan Social Media, A.C.L.U. Says, The New York Times (Oct. 11, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/technology/aclu-facebook-twitter-instagram-geofeedia.html.

[18] Erik Nielson and Andrea L. Dennis, Rap on Trial:  Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America 141-151 (The New Press 2019).

Crime-Free Ordinances Perpetuate Racial Segregation in Housing

At a time when America has become more racially diverse, extreme residential segregation on the basis of race nonetheless persists. The cumulative effects of this segregation on people of color are profound. Residential segregation impacts access to quality education, employment opportunities, government services, and social capital. Facially discriminatory housing laws are illegal. Yet, exclusionary government housing policies continue to sustain racial segregation. In a growing number of communities around the country, housing policy combines with mass criminalization to lock people of color out of housing in predominantly white communities, further producing and entrenching racial segregation. Crime-free housing ordinances and programs (“crime-free housing ordinances”) are some of the most salient examples of this phenomenon. Crime-free housing ordinances are local laws that either encourage or require private landlords to evict or exclude tenants who have had varying levels of contact with the criminal legal system. They are part of the expanding web of zero tolerance policies adopted by private landlords and public housing authorities. Though formally race neutral, these laws facilitate racial segregation in a number of significant ways and their impact on racial segregation is a matter of great public concern.

Under the authority of crime-free housing ordinances, landlords are instructed or encouraged to refuse to rent to perspective tenants with a criminal history, including a history of arrests without conviction, regardless of whether that record suggests a present risk to the safety of other tenants. In some municipalities, landlords are also encouraged to deny rental applications from individuals who were previously evicted because of suspicions that they engaged in criminal activity. The core components of crime-free housing ordinances are lease addendums that allow or require landlords to evict tenants who they believe have engaged in or facilitated criminal behavior. Under the most common version of this addendum, a tenant risks eviction if he or she is alleged to have engaged in or facilitated any criminal activity. Significantly, a resident usually does not have to be convicted in order to be evicted. This creates the possibility that a mere arrest—or even a stop that results in neither arrest nor conviction—might be sufficient to evict someone from their home.

While seeking to maintain the safety of rental properties is a laudable goal, by using contact with the criminal legal system as a tool for exclusion, documented racial biases in policing and the criminal legal system are imported into the private housing market. Through crime-free ordinances, the criminal legal system becomes wrapped around the entire housing process, forcing individuals with criminal legal system contacts to find housing elsewhere. A housing system based on whether a person has involvement with the criminal legal system effectively functions as a racialized system. This is because there are racial disparities at every stage of the criminal legal process. Rejection of a housing application or eviction based on almost any type of criminal legal system exposure will further systemic racial exclusion because of the racial disparities in who has a criminal record.

By relying on criteria destined to exclude people of color at disproportionate rates, crime-free ordinances will perpetuate and increase segregation in the communities that adopt them. And, just as bastions of affluence in certain communities concentrate disadvantage elsewhere, concentrating whiteness in a community will make other communities more segregated. Accordingly, the ordinances will predictably reinforce and perpetuate segregation in surrounding communities by exiling people of color, forcing them to seek housing in already segregated communities, and recreating conditions in those communities that are among the drivers of systemic segregation.

Learn more: Read Deborah Archer's Issue Brief Racial Exclusion Through Crime-Free Housing Ordinances.

A significant part of the danger of crime-free housing ordinances is the broad and over-inclusive definition of criminal activity common in those ordinances. This allows the system to ensnare people who have not engaged in activities that meet traditional notions of “crime” and who have not had any meaningful contact with the criminal legal system. This problem is exacerbated because it occurs against a backdrop of mass criminalization in the United States. The entanglement of crime-free housing ordinances and mass criminalization is pushing already marginalized people further to the edges of society. The problem gets worse the more we criminalize relatively innocuous behavior, thus swelling the numbers of people subject to the web of housing restrictions.

Although many policy makers point to reducing crime as a primary motivation behind the proliferation of these policies, the problem is not actual crime but the myth of criminality. Crime-free housing ordinances indulge many of the dark prejudices at the heart of American history, including a desire to exclude anyone perceived to be a threat. The prevalence of housing exclusions based on any level of contact with the criminal legal system is consistent with America’s broader embrace of exile in response to perceived threats. In so many ways, the history of Black people in America is the history of control and exclusion. Central to that history are the legal and social limitations on how and where Black and other marginalized people can live; exclusions which have outlived both chattel slavery and legally-countenanced Jim Crow. Crime-free housing ordinances are only the newest tool that American communities have developed to define the boundaries of who is allowed to live and thrive within their borders, and thus who can shape and be shaped by living in these communities.

Communities across the United States are beginning to acknowledge the racially disparate impact and far-reaching harms caused by exclusions based on criminal legal system contacts. As a result, there has been progressive movement towards inclusion in areas including employment and political participation. But, for the most part, we have not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which contact with the criminal legal system impacts people’s access to housing. Ensuring the safety of all communities is critically important and should be a priority. Everyone has a right to feel safe in his or her home or community. However, crime-free housing ordinances will not make communities safer. They will continue to divide, further entrenching racial bias and segregation.

Congress Can and Should Take Action on the ERA

This week, the House of Representatives will take up H. J. Res. 79, which would remove the time limit on ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.  The recent ratifications by Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia have put the practice of imposing time limits to the test, and a lawsuit by the Attorneys General of those three states challenges the time limit’s effectiveness.  Whatever happens in the litigation, however, it remains clear that Congress has broad power over the ratification process—so much so that to a great extent, its judgments are not even subject to judicial review.  Congress can and should act now to remove the time limit, honoring the expressed will of those three states and the many others—now 38 in all—that have voted in favor of constitutional equality.

Much has been made of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent comments about the Equal Rights Amendment, in which she expressed a preference that the ratification process “start over.”  Importantly, Justice Ginsburg did not comment about the pending legislation to remove the time limit, or about the pending lawsuit by the state Attorneys General.  Judges do not comment on pending or forthcoming lawsuits—and for good reason.   In our constitutional system, judges do not resolve issues in the abstract; they reserve judgment until they have seen and heard the arguments for each side, presented by counsel in an adversary proceeding.  Justice Ginsburg did not cross this important line.  What she expressed was a preference for a “new beginning” in the face of the “controversy” over what she called the “late comers,” as well as the handful of states that have voted to rescind. To be sure, the existence of this controversy is undeniable and unfortunate.  In 2020, there should be no controversy about the Equal Rights Amendment.  That is precisely why members of Congress plan to take an important step to resolve it by removing the time limit altogether.

The arguments in support of the current efforts are powerful.  The time limit on the ERA does not appear in the body of the amendment itself; Congress chose to place it in the accompanying joint resolution.  Through this choice, Congress reserved for itself the power to change it, under the familiar premise that one Congress cannot bind future Congresses.  Congress made such a change in 1978, extending the time limit by another three years.  And it can do so again now.  Doing so would eliminate the argument that the validity of the Equal Rights Amendment depends on something other than Article V of the Constitution, which states in plain text that an amendment “shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several States.”

On the merits of the Equal Rights Amendment, Justice Ginsburg’s views are clear. Although she acknowledges the progress that has been made over many years, she recognizes the limits of that progress, even under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.  She also notes that even if the ERA were merely symbolic at this point, “it is a very important symbol.”  After all, every Constitution written in the world since 1950—even Afghanistan’s—contains a provision equivalent to the ERA.  In testimony in support of H. J. Res. 79, scholar and former dean of Stanford Law School Kathleen Sullivan explained that the absence of an equal rights guarantee from our Constitution is a “national embarrassment.” Congress now has the power to correct it.

Book Talk: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court

The following is a summary by the authors of the new book, Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court, Oxford University Press (2020).

Chief Justice Earl Warren retired from the Supreme Court a half-century ago, marking the end of the Warren Court. Before Warren joined the Court, school districts in 17 American states required black schoolchildren to go to different schools from white children. In 27 states, it was illegal for a black person to marry a white person. Every state in the nation violated the principle of “one person, one vote,” many of them grotesquely so. Government officials could sue their critics for ruinous damages for incorrect statements, even if the critics acted in good faith. Members of the Communist Party and other dissenters could be criminally prosecuted for their speech. Married couples could be denied the right to use contraception. Public school teachers led their classes in overtly religious prayers. Police officers could interrogate suspects without telling them their rights. People were convicted of crimes on the basis of evidence that police officers seized illegally. And criminal defendants who could not afford a lawyer had no right to a public defender. 

The Warren Court changed all of that. In all of these ways, and others, the Constitution, as we know it today, is very much the work of the Warren Court. It would be unthinkable to return to the world that existed before the Warren Court. 

But despite that, the Warren Court today does not have the reputation it deserves. Conservative critics, in particular, have consistently attacked it—now, as they did then—as “lawless.” But the Warren Court had a vision of the role the Supreme Court should play in American government, and even the Warren Court’s most controversial decisions had deep roots in American law and traditions. Critics who say that the Warren Court “went too far” or was “too activist” should be asked: which of the Warren Court’s decisions would you overturn? 

Today, especially, it is important to see just how wrong the Warren Court’s critics are. Over the past half-century, the Supreme Court has become increasingly conservative. In this environment, the notion that the rulings of the Warren Court were examples of excessive judicial “activism” that were not based on law is especially toxic. That line of criticism opens the door to conservative claims that conservatives, alone, are truly committed to the rule of law—that the decisions of the Warren Court were the product of the justices’ political opinions or fuzzy liberal sentiment, not real law. It rationalizes aggressively conservative judicial decisions as a necessary corrective. All of that is wrong. The Warren Court’s decisions—unlike, it should be said, many decisions of the conservative Courts that followed it—were principled, lawful, and consistent with the spirit and fundamental values of our Constitution.

The Warren Court’s vision, at its core, was deeply democratic. The Warren Court thought its role was to act when American democracy was not truly democratic: when some groups were marginalized or excluded and denied their fair share of democratic political power. Most important, the Warren Court protected the interests of African Americans in the Jim Crow South, who were effectively kept from voting in many places and were utterly excluded, often violently, from positions of influence. The Warren Court protected political dissidents, stating unequivocally that free and open debate is a central commitment of any democratic government. In its “one person, one vote” decisions, the Warren Court put an end to manipulative and unjustified disparities in people’s ability to elect their representatives. The Warren Court acted on behalf of members of minority religious groups whose interests were disregarded by the majority, and of criminal defendants who were often also members of discriminated-against minority groups and who lacked any effective voice in politics. 

Contrary to the critics, this was a principled and appropriate role for the Supreme Court to play. Ordinarily the people’s elected representatives should make the important political decisions in a democracy. If the courts are to step in, they must have a reason: a reason why a particular issue should not be left to ordinary democratic processes. In the cases that made the Warren Court famous, there were such reasons. The Warren Court did the things – fighting race discrimination, making sure that everyone’s vote counted the same, protecting dissidents from a majority that wanted to silence them – that a democracy needs to do and that elected representatives cannot always be trusted to do. 

The Warren Court’s decisions implemented deeply-rooted American traditions of equality, democracy, and respect for the dignity of individuals—traditions that began with the Framing of the Constitution and were revitalized by the Reconstruction Amendments, and to which generations of judges, elected officials, and ordinary citizens have contributed. Those traditions have not always been honored as they should be; the Warren Court’s mission was to extend them to people who had previously been excluded. The Warren Court’s decisions brought to life our deepest national commitments. 

Leading figures in the conservative legal movement have adopted, in name at least, an approach to the Constitution that they call “originalism.” Originalism has many variants, but the essential idea is that judges, in interpreting the Constitution, should adhere to decisions made by the people who adopted the constitutional provision in question. Originalism conveys a sense of rigor, and the conservative embrace of originalism has fed into the notion that only conservatives do real law—that the Warren Court justices were unprincipled “activists” who were engaged in politics or simply enforcing their own preferences and sensibilities. 

The achievements of the Warren Court are themselves a refutation of originalism. Many Warren Court decisions that even conservatives accept today would unquestionably have surprised the people who adopted the constitutional provisions that the Court was interpreting. Ironically, there is a cottage industry among conservative legal scholars who try to show that decisions that they dare not renounce—Brown, most prominently—actually are consistent with originalism, even though the Warren Court itself never made such a claim and even though the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. 

The deeper problem, though, is that originalism is not actually rigorous at all. It is not even clear what question originalism asks; over time, originalism seems to have migrated from a search for original “intent” to original “understandings” to original “public meaning” to more complex and esoteric variations, often without a clear account of just what those notions require. It is all too easy for originalism to serve as rhetorical garb for conclusions that are reached for other reasons; people with opinions about gun rights, or religion, or affirmative action, or campaign spending, or the size of the federal government find enough in the archives to convince themselves that the Framers of the Constitution agreed with them.

To be clear, if originalism means adhering to the ideals that the Framers embraced—rule by the people, individual dignity, equality—then no one could object to originalism. And the Warren Court promoted those originalist ideals in a way that no Court, before or since, has ever done. But if originalism purports to dictate the outcomes of specific cases, then there are any number of problems with it—problems that have been rehearsed over and over, and never satisfactorily answered by originalists. The idea that the Warren Court wasn’t lawful because it wasn’t originalist has things backwards. The fact that even conservatives are unwilling to repudiate the central Warren Court decisions shows that originalism is not viable—and that the approach the Warren Court took has a more solid foundation in the law than anything originalism can provide. 

In the post-Warren Court era, conservative justices have aggressively invalidated gun control legislation, even though there is no reason to believe that the democratic process is unable to deal with that issue. Similarly, conservative justices in recent decades have undermined affirmative action, even though it is difficult to see why a local school board—or any politically accountable body, which will be responsive to nonminority voters—should not be allowed to deal with school integration and affirmative action in the way it sees fit. And there are other examples of conservatives’ unjustified judicial activism, when the Court has undermined, instead of reinforcing, the power of the people to rule themselves: decisions invalidating critical provisions of the Affordable Care Act and the Voting Rights Act, striking down restrictions on commercial advertising, holding laws regulating corporations unconstitutional, resolving the 2000 presidential election,  and refusing to invalidate gerrymandering. 

In Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court, we illustrate our claims about the Warren Court by examining 12 of its most important and controversial decisions. We discuss what the world was like before these decisions, what the decisions did, and why they were justified. We have moved well past the Warren era, of course. It is not clear when, or if, there will again be a Court with the same aspirations and commitments. But it is worth keeping in mind what the Warren Court accomplished, if only to give us an idea of what is possible.