LAUSR

Chief Justice John G. Roberts’s Court emboldened anti-VRA activists and career litigants such as Edward Blum. The authors also show that voting rights advocates have struggled to connect Jim Crow–era disenfranchisement to the ongoing need for regional scrutiny and preclearance—particularly given the unprecedented number of African Americans in politics. Indeed, the Roberts Court held that the current data on black political participation rendered Section 4 obsolete. If this book has limitations they lie in the data-driven and celebratory illustration of the VRA’s rise. The VRA typified the height of the civil rights movement, yet that movement (save a brief allusion to protests in Selma, Alabama) is nowhere to be found in this book. In demonstrating rampant preVRA disenfranchisement, the authors gloss over the suffrage crusades that created the conditions necessary to pass the VRA. Black political will also gave rise to innovative resistance to the VRA. Conspicuously absent here is the reemergence of vote dilution and the Earl Warren and Warren Burger Courts’ subsequent reapportionment revolution. The historical record shows—thanks to scholars like J. Morgan Kousser, Richard M. Valelly, Frank R. Parker, Hugh Graham, and Steven F. Lawson—that it is impossible to separate the VRA’s renewal and constitutional evolution from the continuation of racist trends in southern politics. The legacy ofmodern disenfranchisement has a longer history than the authors acknowledge. The book closes with an examination of the ways Congress might restore preclearance in light of Shelby and the recent proliferation of voter ID laws. If the depiction of the VRA’s uncertain future represents another timely scholarly contribution, the authors’ analysis of voter ID laws seems premature. While it may be true that recent data concerning voter ID laws shows little voter suppression, it is also true that analyzing the outcome of these laws requires yet another complicated phase of data collection, testing, and waiting. That aside, this expansive story of the VRA not only asks some tough questions about the future of voting rights but also forces scholars to question how the act’s history portends the road ahead.