The Republican Party, also known as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the then-dominant Democratic Party in the mid-1850s, and the two parties have dominated American politics ever since.
Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
The Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution states that any law that increases or decreases the salary of members of Congress may take effect only after the next election of the House of Representatives has occurred. It is the most recently adopted amendment but was one of the first proposed.
Disfranchisement, also disenfranchisement or voter disqualification, is the restriction of suffrage of a person or group of people, or a practice that has the effect of preventing someone from exercising the right to vote. Disfranchisement can also refer to the revocation of power or control of a particular individual, community, or being to the natural amenity they have; that is to deprive of a franchise, of a legal right, of some privilege or inherent immunity. Disfranchisement may be accomplished explicitly by law or implicitly through requirements applied in a discriminatory fashion, through intimidation, or by placing unreasonable requirements on voters for registration or voting. High barriers to entry to the political competition can disenfranchise political movements.
John Cabell Breckinridge was an American lawyer, politician, and soldier. He represented Kentucky in both houses of Congress and became the 14th and youngest-ever vice president of the United States. Serving from 1857 to 1861, he took office at the age of 36. He was a member of the Democratic Party, and ran for president in 1860 as a Southern Democrat. He served in the U.S. Senate during the outbreak of the American Civil War, but was expelled after joining the Confederate Army. He was appointed Confederate Secretary of War in 1865.
The University of Kentucky is a public land-grant research university in Lexington, Kentucky. Founded in 1865 by John Bryan Bowman as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky, the university is one of the state's two land-grant universities. It is the institution with the highest enrollment in the state, with 32,710 students in the fall of 2022.
William Orville Douglas was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views and is often cited as the U.S. Supreme Court's most liberal justice ever. Nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, Douglas was confirmed at the age of 40, becoming one of the youngest justices appointed to the court. In 1975, Time called Douglas "the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court." He is the longest-serving justice in history, having served for 36 years and 211 days.
Frederick "Fred" Moore Vinson was an American attorney and politician who served as the 13th chief justice of the United States from 1946 until his death in 1953. Vinson was one of the few Americans to have served in all three branches of the U.S. government. Before becoming chief justice, Vinson served as a U.S. Representative from Kentucky from 1924 to 1928 and 1930 to 1938, as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1938 to 1943, and as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury from 1945 to 1946.
Douglas Howard Ginsburg is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a senior U.S. circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He is also a professor of law at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School.
Laurence Henry Tribe is an American legal scholar who is a University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He previously served as the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School.
Election law is a branch of public law that relates to the democratic processes, election of representatives and office holders, and referendums, through the regulation of the electoral system, voting rights, ballot access, election management bodies, election campaign, the division of the territory into electoral zones, the procedures for the registration of voters and candidacies, its financing and propaganda, voting, counting of votes, scrutiny, electoral disputes, electoral observation and all contentious matters derived from them. It is a discipline falling at the juncture of constitutional law and political science, and involves "the politics of law and the law of politics".
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential ticket wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome.
Robert Perkins Letcher was a politician and lawyer from the US state of Kentucky. He served as a U.S. Representative, Minister to Mexico, and the 15th Governor of Kentucky. He also served in the Kentucky General Assembly where he was Speaker of the House in 1837 and 1838. A strong supporter of the Whig Party, he was a friend of Henry Clay and John J. Crittenden.
Madeline (Madge) McDowell Breckinridge was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky. She married Desha Breckinridge, editor of the Lexington Herald, which advocated women's rights, and she lived to see the women of Kentucky vote for the first time in the presidential election of 1920. She also initiated progressive reforms for compulsory school attendance and child labor. She founded many civic organizations, notably the Kentucky Association for the Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculosis, an affliction from which she had personally suffered. She led efforts to implement model schools for children and adults, parks and recreation facilities, and manual training programs.
Spencer A. Overton is an American lawyer, President of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and law professor at George Washington University Law School. He is a leading election law scholar, and is a tenured Professor of Law at George Washington University.
Boyd County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of the 2020 census, its population was 48,261. The county seat is Catlettsburg, and its largest city is Ashland. The county was formed in 1860. The county spans 160 square miles (410 km2), and is found at the northeastern edge of the state, near the Ohio River and Big Sandy River and situated in mountainous Appalachia. Boyd County is in the Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH metropolitan statistical area.
Marc Erik Elias is an American Democratic Party elections lawyer. In 2020, he founded Democracy Docket, a website focused on voting rights and election litigation in the United States, and he left his position as a partner at Perkins Coie to start the Elias Law Group in 2021.
The Thomas More Society is a conservative Roman Catholic public-interest law firm based in Chicago. The group has been engaged in many "culture war" issues, promoting its anti-abortion and anti-same-sex marriage beliefs through litigation. The society filed cases as part of Donald Trump's failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, in which Trump was defeated. The society is formally recognized by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as a National Catholic Association, a type of public association of the faithful under the canon law of the Catholic Church.
Barbara Ann Perry is a presidency and U.S. Supreme Court expert, as well as a biographer of the Kennedys. She is also the Gerald L. Baliles Professor and Director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, where she co-chairs the Presidential Oral History Program. As an oral historian, Perry has conducted more than 100 interviews for the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush Presidential Oral History Projects, researched the President Clinton Project interviews, and directed the Edward Kennedy Oral History Project.
Arthur Peter Mutharika is a Malawian politician and lawyer who was President of Malawi from May 2014 to June 2020. Mutharika has worked in the field of international justice, specialising in international economic law, international law and comparative constitutional law. He informally served as an adviser to his older brother, President Bingu wa Mutharika, on issues of foreign and domestic policy from the onset of his election campaign until the President's death on 5 April 2012.
