Five Questions with Justin Levitt
Justin Levitt is a law professor at Loyola Marymount School of Law in Southern California. Occasionally, though, he steps off campus for other duties as assigned. We met during one of those stints, when he served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice during the Obama administration. Justin focused on voting rights and voter protection issues, and I was fortunate enough to get to work with him. Just one example: The agreement DOJ reached with the state of Alabama, bringing it into compliance with provisions of the Motor Voter Act that made it easier for Alabamians to register to vote, was Justin’s brainchild.
He returned to Loyola at the end of the administration, but returned to Washington, D.C., from 2021 – 22 to serve as President Biden’s Senior Policy Advisor for Democracy and Voting Rights, a newly created position in the White House. Justin has always struck me as someone who is less interested in the politics of voting and more interested in finding innovative ways to guarantee Americans’ rights, regardless of who they intend to vote for. He describes his work in the Biden White House as assisting “the President in his efforts to make sure that every eligible American has secure, reliable access to a meaningful vote,” and also working “to restore trust in a democracy deserving of that trust; and to bolster avenues by which Americans build community and engage in civic participation.”
Justin’s legal scholarship is published extensively—in places like law reviews at Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Georgetown, and Yale. But it’s his public scholarship that intrigues me the most. He is hands-down the best person I know to explain the arcana of election law in ways that make it comprehensible for non-lawyers, and I frequently turn to him for insight and understanding. So it makes sense that in advance of Tuesday’s elections, I asked him to be our guest tonight. In this moment of celebration, his views are just what we needed to end a week where we saw exactly what we’ve been discussing here at Civil Discourse happen: Americans voted, and because we did our job, the institutions held.
Read on for Justin’s take on the momentous time we’ve just lived through and what it tells us about the future. You’ll want to absorb every word of his wisdom, and also the encouragement and acknowledgement he offers for the work that ordinary people across the country did on Tuesday.
“Five Questions” is a Friday feature for paid subscribers, built around conversations that don’t fit into a news cycle that’s driven by headlines and hot takes. It’s a chance for us to spend time with the people shaping the law, politics, and democracy—and to ask the questions that matter most, not just the ones everyone else is asking. Keeping the daily legal analysis free has always been important to me, and it stays that way. These Friday conversations are my opportunity to thank paid subscribers for their support, which ensures that Civil Discourse can remain available to everyone who wants to read it. Whether you’re a paid subscriber or a free subscriber, I’m beyond grateful you’re here. Happy Election Week to all of us!