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

USC Gould School of Law Dean Franita Tolson’s new book explores how Congress quietly shaped American elections for more than a century, using its authority under the Elections Clause, the Guarantee Clause, and later, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, to combat voter suppression, reimagine representation, and determine who could (and could not) participate in American democracy. Even as Jim Crow laws disenfranchised millions, Congress continued to review and sometimes overturn the elections of its own members, refusing to cede complete control to the states. Join Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of Berkeley Law as he moderates this BHBA Book Talk with Dean Tolson that will provide important legal historical context to current voting rights debates.