Taking (Equal Voting) Rights Seriously: The Fifteenth Amendment as Constitutional Foundation, and the Need for Judges to Remodel Their Approach to Age Discrimination in Political Rights

This Essay explores the relationship between twentieth-century voting-discrimination amendments and the Fifteenth Amendment’s antidiscrimination groundwork on which these later developments built. In particular, it examines ways in which the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, whose text and ratification conversations tightly track those of the Fifteenth Amendment, has been underimplemented, if not completely ignored, in recent debates and cases that are ever-more crucial to the meaning of political-rights equality under the Constitution. It ends by urging courts to take more seriously the similarities between the Twenty-Sixth and Fifteenth Amendments in adjudicating disputes involving facial or de facto age discrimination in political rights realms.