Robinson (UC Berkeley School of Law photo) It’s not embracing demographic change - in some ways, it’s trying to lock in the traditional ways of understanding power and who holds power in America.” … But it feels like this is a backward-looking court. More young people identify as non-heterosexual, non-cisgender. “We’re seeing more and more the browning of America. “Our country is becoming more diverse,” Robinson said. Robinson, faculty director of the Center on Race, Sexuality and Culture. It could mean law, at every level, that is more hostile to people who have long suffered from political and social exclusion, said Berkeley Law Professor Russell K. “What’s it going to mean to have a Supreme Court that’s come down so clearly on one side of that divide and so far to the right on that side of the divide?”

“At a time when our country is so politically polarized, the Supreme Court is a risk factor for American democracy,” said Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars. Last year, the court’s six conservative justices seemed to embrace conservative Christian doctrine in decisions that limit abortion rights and advance public school prayer.Įrwin Chemerinsky (UC Berkeley School of Law photo) In the span of less than 15 years, they say, an increasingly conservative court has eroded limits on campaign donations and hollowed out the monumental Voting Rights Act of 1965. Last November, white Republican men won six of Alabama’s gerrymandered districts, leaving the last seat to a Black woman.įor many legal analysts nationwide, including some at the UC Berkeley School of Law, the high court’s intervention was the latest in a series of recent rulings that are jeopardizing core standards of democracy. Supreme Court took the case, the conservative majority allowed the maps to stand, pending a full review this spring. Lower courts agreed, and ordered the legislators to draw more equitable maps before the 2022 midterm elections.īut when the U.S. Voting rights advocates sued the state, arguing that the districts illegally diluted Black political power. democracy in a series that draws on the expertise of campus scholars. Berkeley News is examining threats to U.S.

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