#  Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar: Guy-Uriel Charles 

 



    ![Guy-Uriel Charles](/sites/g/files/omnuum5566/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-01/11681.jpg?h=080746e2&itok=QD-L2KpZ) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **February 24, 2025** 

 12:00PM - 01:15PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Malkin Penthouse**  

Harvard Kennedy School

 

 

 



 

### Election Law and Structural Inequality

**Guy-Uriel Charles**, *Charles Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School*

**Abstract:** Election law has long grappled with fundamental, important, and familiar challenges. These include addressing the problems of political inequality in the design of electoral structures, racial exclusion from representative democracy, and wealth’s role in inhibiting and facilitating self-governance. For a long time, election law addressed these and many more similar issues more or less successfully. This is largely because the problems of democratic politics were, more or less, addressable by applying the core commitments of the extant constitutional order. Importantly, American democracy relied on the Supreme Court to excavate, articulate, and implement those commitments.

However, in the last few years, the challenges to democratic politics have changed. Our politics have become much more existential and, consequently, so have our constitutional disputes. In an emergent category of law and democracy cases, the Court is being asked to save American democracy by adjudicating between divergent partisan conceptions of democracy and antidemocracy. Each side contends that the other is antidemocratic and effectively asks the Court to arbitrate between their competing claims.

Whereas past challenges could be resolved by invoking the commitments of America’s liberal constitutional democracy, these newer and emerging challenges cannot be resolved similarly. This is because these new challenges call into question the content of the polity’s commitments, not its failure to apply them. They are about whether the polity continues to subscribe to the liberal democratic order. Because these emergent challenges are about liberal democracy itself, students and practitioners of the law of democracy can no longer depend upon the Court to resolve democracy’s pathologies.

Election law is now in its reconstruction era. Election law scholars need to develop new tools and build new institutions. Many of the familiar, well-worn tools that served the field best were developed under different political conditions and are of limited utility for our era of existential politics. To meet the challenge of structural reform, we must ask our politics to do much more and our courts to do much less.

**Guy-Uriel Charles** is the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he also directs the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice. He writes about how law mediates political power and how law addresses racial subordination. He teaches courses on civil procedure; election law; constitutional law; race and law; critical race theory; legislation and statutory interpretation; law, economics, and politics; and law, identity, and politics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Law Institute. He was appointed by President Joseph Biden to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is currently working on a book, with Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, on the past and future of voting rights, under contract with Cambridge University Press, which argues that the race-based model that underlies the Voting Rights Act has run its course and that the best way to protect against racial discrimination in voting is through a universal, positive rights model of political participation. He is also co-editing, with Aziza Ahmed, a handbook entitled Race, Racism, and the Law, under contract with Edward Elgar Publishing. This book will survey the current state of research on race and the law in the United States and aims to influence the intellectual agenda of the field.

His academic articles have appeared in Constitutional Commentary, The Michigan Law Review, The Michigan Journal of Race and Law, The Georgetown Law Journal, The Journal of Politics, The California Law Review, The North Carolina Law Review, and others. He is co-author of Election Law in The American Political System (with James Gardner) and Racial Justice & Law: Cases And Materials (with Ralph Richard Banks, Kim Forde-Mazrui and Cristina Rodriguez). He is co-editor of The New Black: What Has Changed And What Has Not With Race In America (with Kenneth Mack) and Race, Reform, And Regulation Of The Electoral Process: Recurring Puzzles In American Democracy (with Heather Gerken and Michael Kang). His public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Time, Time, The Atlantic, Slate, among many venues. He has delivered distinguished lectures at various universities including University of California, Davis Law School, University of Richmond Law School, University of Oregon Law School, William and Mary Law School.

Professor Charles received his JD from the University of Michigan Law School and clerked for The Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. While at the University of Michigan, he was one of the founders and the first editor-in-chief of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law. From 1995-2000, he was a graduate student in political science at the University of Michigan.

Before teaching at Harvard, he taught at Duke Law School and at the University of Minnesota Law School. He also served as interim co-dean at the University of Minnesota from 2006-2008. He has been a visiting professor at Georgetown, Virginia, and Columbia law schools. He was a past member of the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting and the Century Foundation Working Group on Election Reform. In 2006, he was awarded the distinguished teaching award at the University of Minnesota Law School. In 2016, he was awarded the distinguished teaching award at Duke Law School.



 

**Due to building access restrictions, if you do not have a Harvard ID and wish to attend, you must email** [**inequality@hks.harvard.edu**](mailto:inequality@hks.harvard.edu) **to receive permission.**



 

 

 



 

 

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