Addressing Federalism and Separation of Powers Social Violence: The Ordinary Citizen Beyond Shelby County, North Carolina and Ohio and Voting Rights

Abstract

This essay builds on my experience at a voter integrity group named True the Vote meeting at its Ohio Summit on August 25, 2012 and subsequent developments in the US Supreme Court and states. I examine this topic experience through four lenses: private and public forms of what I term social violence; negotiation theory; recent work on explicit bias, implicit bias and stereotype threat; Derrick Bell’s work on interest convergence theory and the personal limits of that approach when one operates in both the domestic and international law spheres; Francesco Alberoni’s work on how movements get started and in particular a person reaches depressive overload and what he terms the nascent state, seeks affinity with others to create a movement that confronts institutions. Through these four lenses, I hope to assist reflection on a manner of thinking about the Shelby County’s, the North Carolina’s, and Ohio’s and Voting Rights.