POSC 130g 1st Edition Lecture 21 Current Lecture People should be able to explain religious customs it is a matter of equality People have the right to freedom of association and to belong to groups People should have a chance to protect the evidence in court Judges should arbitrarily exclude the evidence The jury doesn t have to give much weight to the argument Should the evidence be allowed to be presented and how much wait should it be given Justice requires that people are given the chance to make an argument Different types of intellectual property The laws should protect cultural heritage Sacred landscapes groups have to tell secrets that their group isn t supposed to tell Some of the challenges with regulating intellectual property and intangible property Challenges of using law to protect intellectual property rights In Western law an individual has to prove that he composed the music or he came up with the drug etc Groups have trouble trying to reap the benefits of their culture it isn t an adequate mechanism Some people have proposed the idea of a system onto itself that would protect the intellectual property rights of its groups Who owns culture Huge debate as to whether some cultural artifacts are so important that it belongs to world culture not just the group that created it Common heritage of mankind something is so important that one group doesn t own it Should it be sent back to the place of origin It can be between two countries or the world Sometimes indigenous people s artifacts have been touched by outsiders Political Participation in the Law many different types of voting system United States is optional whether people vote In Australia there are mandatory voting systems Different kinds of democratic systems In parliamentary systems even though there are voting rights it is the legislature that elects the head There is common law and voting rights but the way the system is structured gives different power to citizens in the system In a democratic system citizens are expected to vote The right to vote is suffrage suffradian is the latin word for a voting tablet Some of the big decisions of the Supreme Court are related to suffrage To what extent is protests under the Constitution and to what extent should it be protected The right to vote is part of the Constitutional system international covenant on civil and political rights there are two key provisions Article 21 on the Universal declaration of human rights and the other is in the international covenant on civil and political rights protect the right to vote and free and periodic elections This led to controversy If they are promoting human rights but some people can t vote then is this really protecting human rights Any country that ratifies treaty is choosing to be bound by that treaty The question is how do we interpret the right to periodic elections According to Frank s Analysis this right involves three parts to democratic governance principle of self determination right to free political expression and the right to free periodic elections Can you have a democracy without having elections General Comment Article 25 deals with how the UN thinks that election monitoring should be put into practice Barriers to Voting in the United States Many groups were excluded from voting denied franchise African Americans Women Native Americans and in some place Jewish and Catholics It was denied from a lot of people During the Civil War most white men were allowed to vote regardless if they had property In 1869 15th Amendment gave the rights to African Americans to vote but not women This was during Black Codes which were devices that were used to restrict African American s ability to vote Some policies were poll taxes hiding the location of where the polls where literacy tests economic pressure and sometimes the government would look the other way when violence was used They used the grandfather clause to exempt uneducated whites but prevent African Americans from voting This was in effect until 1939 There were some of the kinds of strategies Women didn t have the right to vote for quite some time The instigation of the right to vote was in the 1770s but it really began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 Women got the right to vote in 1920 with the adoption of the 19th Amendment Other groups had trouble getting the right to vote Native Americans didn t get the right to vote until they became American citizens and were subject to the same kinds of pressures as African Americans Because of Immigration laws in the 1940s that finally extended the right to vote to some but not all Asian Pacific Islanders Oregon v Mitchell Supreme Court rendered a decision that gave 18 year olds the right to vote All White Primary political primaries was supposed to be private and thus beyond the reach of the law The Constitution applies to governmental action not private There were a series of cases the Supreme Court was asked to examine the all white primaries In Texas in the early cases the Supreme Court treated primaries as private groups and therefore beyond the reach of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment but eventually the Supreme Court revisits this in US v Classic under Article 1 Section 4 because primaries are part of the electoral process This didn t deal with race but established the Constitutional principle that federal regulations of primaries was permissible and also the unitary case of elections In Smith v Allwright overturned the precedent and said no more all white primaries Residency Requirements Supreme Court dealt with whether you had to live in a certain place for a certain time as a condition of voting That was held to violate equal protection clause in 1972 Dunn v Bloomski The Supreme Court said that it violated equal protected to impose a poll tax in state elections in Harper v Virginia Board of Education The 24th Amendment eliminated poll tax Key Legislation The Civil Rights Act of 1957 created the United States Commission of Civil Rights that was empowered to investigate voting right violations in federal regulations It was weak in terms of enforcement In 1960 the Civil Rights Act of 1960 that required local registrars to keep federal election records for at least twenty two months This made it easier to collect information In 1964 the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has some provisions that protect voters In 1969 the Voting Rights Act was thought to be the most important civil rights laws and