Book Talk: In Congress We Trust? Enforcing Voting Rights from the Founding to the Jim Crow Era

Franita Tolson is Dean and Carl Mason Franklin Chair in Law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She also holds a courtesy faculty appointment in the Political Science and International Relations Department at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Her scholarship and teaching focus on the areas of election law, constitutional law, legal history, and employment discrimination. She has written on a wide range of topics including partisan gerrymandering, political parties, the Elections Clause, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Her research has appeared in leading law reviews including the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review. Tolson is one of the coauthors of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2022). Her forthcoming book, In Congress We Trust?: Enforcing Voting Rights from the Founding to the Jim Crow Era, will be published by Cambridge University Press.

As a nationally recognized expert in election law, Tolson has written for or appeared as a commentator for various mass media outlets including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Bloomberg Law. She has testified before Congress numerous times on voting rights issues. She has also authored a legal analysis for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Richard Durbin, that would explicitly protect the right to vote. In addition, Tolson worked as an election law analyst for CNN in 2020 and NBC in 2024. She currently co-hosts an election themed podcast, Free and Fair with Franita and Foley, with Ned Foley of The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

At USC Gould, Tolson had previously served as the interim dean (since 2023) and held the George T. and Harriet E. Pfleger Chair in Law. Before that, she was the law school’s vice dean for faculty and academic affairs from 2019 to 2022.

Prior to joining USC, Tolson was the Betty T. Ferguson Professor of Voting Rights at Florida State University College of Law and a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Before entering academia, she clerked for the Honorable Ann Claire Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the Honorable Ruben Castillo of the Northern District of Illinois.

Tolson is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, where she was the Walter V. Schaefer Visiting Professor of Law during the Spring 2021 academic quarter.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law.

Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law. Before that he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. From 1980-1983, he was an assistant professor at DePaul College of Law.

He is the author of nineteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. His most recent major books are Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism (2022) and Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (2021).

He also is the author of more than 200 law review articles. He is a contributing writer for the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, and writes regular columns for the Sacramento Bee, the ABA Journal and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country. He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.  

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2024, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States. In 2022, he was the President of the Association of American Law Schools. He received his B.S. at Northwestern University and his J.D. at Harvard Law School.