Academics don’t usually like to “self promote,” especially when it comes to big career moves. But this is news about me that I’m thrilled to share:
I will be joining the Case Western Reserve University School of Law faculty as a tenured full professor effective January 1, 2023. Though this is a major transition, I will nonetheless continue my teaching and scholarship around Election Law, Civil Rights, and Race and the Law.
In particular, I will be engaged two exciting projects in the near future at Case which will expand my research, engagement, and public commentary around voter eligibility, democracy, and race. First, I’m excited to share that I am co-authoring a forthcoming new edition of Derrick Bell’s Race Racism and American Law (with Cheryl Harris, Justin Hansford, Amna Akbar, and Audrey McFarland). The completed book will be forthcoming in the next year or so. Second, I look forward to furthering preliminary work I have done towards a book project around voter suppression and American democracy. Both of these projects will inform the contributions I look forward to making at Case.
While I’m saddened to leave my friends at Marquette and am grateful for the five years of community I have had in Wisconsin, my spouse and I are excited to have the opportunity to be on the ground in Ohio. While she forwards her work on military ethics, I look forward to continuing to teach, lecture, and research around the present and future of American democracy.
At the heart of the modern battles over the American right to vote is a tension between two constitutional values. On one side is the original Constitution and the autonomy it grants the states over the franchise. On the other are the Reconstruction Amendments and the modern demands for equality. With few textual caveats, the Constitution of 1789 gave states near-autonomy to shape the right to vote. Many states did so in a way that reflected an antebellum vision of citizenship rooted in popular (in its time) eighteenth-century notions of status, wealth, and identity—a definition that excluded many. This value of autonomy, and the social ordering underlying it, continues to influence the modern contours of voting rights despite the social transformations the United States has undergone. Yet these movements toward social transformation put the value of autonomy in tension with the value of equality, so that within a generation of the framing of the Constitution, the identity of the American citizen became a contested concept. This contest led to the post-Civil War amendment of the Constitution to include doctrines geared towards citizenry equality and the practice of federal intervention to insure enforcement of those doctrines. Thus, from a modern perspective, equality of citizens has become an important (and some may argue more important) a value as state autonomy. Yet this proposition remains a contested concept measured against the value of state autonomy. Thus, state autonomy (and its use to hold to the arguable residuary of an antebellum social order) and post-Reconstruction equality (and its use to form a new social order) continue to be at odds. This talk will offer perspectives on this competition of values within the right-to-vote context and describe how these tensions play out in the modern-day voter suppression debates.
It is this right that makes the US a democratic form of government, it is this right that is, in the words of the Supreme Court, “preservative of all other rights.”
TEDxOshkosh performance: Using Memes to Break Out of Voter Fraud Talk
forward to reflecting on the open, online 
Atiba Ellis 