Alex Votta recently received Michigan Law’s Dimond Prize for his paper “The Great Rampart in Protecting Human Liberty: The Right to Education in Antebellum and Reconstruction Black Constitutional Consciousness.” The prize recognizes the best scholarly work each year in civil rights, constitutional law, or judicial review.
Votta is a legal historian pursuing his PhD in U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; his research is focused on the juvenile justice system, particularly juvenile life without parole.
His paper argues that Black Americans in the mid-19th century considered education a constitutional right, derived from principles embodied in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence: liberty, equality, and citizenship.
Votta’s paper delves into records of the Black Convention Movement, during which Black Americans debated what a post-emancipation society could and should look like. After the Civil War, the first wave of Black lawmakers—delegates to the southern states’ constitutional conventions—tried to enshrine their conception of the right to education into the new state constitutions, the paper demonstrates.
Votta first learned about the importance of Black delegates at the Louisiana constitutional convention in his Boundaries of Citizenship course with Professor Rebecca Scott. That class helped him think through the relationship between law and race, he said. “In terms of skills and learning how to do legal history, that class was really important.”
The initial spark for Votta’s paper came in Professor Elise Boddie’s Reimagining Equal Protection class when Votta was a 2L. Students read the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which held that affirmative action in admissions violated the equal protection clause.
“There was an interesting exchange, for me as a historian, between Justice Thomas’s concurrence and Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, where they go into their interpretations of the history of the Fourteenth Amendment. The thing that struck me is that the folks they were quoting were the white lawmakers who were passing the Fourteenth Amendment”—not the Black Americans who were immediately affected by it, Votta said.
Votta wrote his original paper as a 2L and then refocused it and continued working on it throughout his 3L year. In the paper, Votta relied on the work of James Fox on the Black constitutional conventions.
Votta said he is grateful to Professor Samuel Erman, ’07, for overseeing his research. “He really helped me home in on thinking about: What are the actual contours of the rights?”
The Race, Law, and History Workshop that Erman and Professor Michelle Adams taught brought in “many different scholars to talk about the works they have in progress, and we got to read from many different fields—all sorts of legal scholarship and historical scholarship. That was helpful in seeing all of the ways that you can combine legal history with political history and with intellectual history and do really important and innovative work,” Votta said.
Votta’s PhD work has helped him see the law differently, he said. “Thinking historically, in the way historians do, is something that lawyers don’t always do.”
He pointed to the justices’ debate in Students for Fair Admissions, as it “left out the voices of Black Americans who were pushing for abolition,” he said. “And I think there are reasons for that. There are constraints of what’s considered legitimate versus not legitimate uses of the past, but those aren’t set in stone, and I think we should change them.”
Winning the Dimond Prize, Votta said, provides a boost as he delves deeper into his doctoral studies.
“It’s really meaningful to me to have had people who are experienced academics, who are doing the work that I want to do when I eventually graduate, say this is an important piece of legal historical scholarship of constitutional law and civil rights—and an affirmation that this is a field that matters.”
Votta is a legal historian pursuing his PhD in U-M’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; his research is focused on the juvenile justice system, particularly juvenile life without parole.
His paper argues that Black Americans in the mid-19th century considered education a constitutional right, derived from principles embodied in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence: liberty, equality, and citizenship.
Votta’s paper delves into records of the Black Convention Movement, during which Black Americans debated what a post-emancipation society could and should look like. After the Civil War, the first wave of Black lawmakers—delegates to the southern states’ constitutional conventions—tried to enshrine their conception of the right to education into the new state constitutions, the paper demonstrates.
Votta first learned about the importance of Black delegates at the Louisiana constitutional convention in his Boundaries of Citizenship course with Professor Rebecca Scott. That class helped him think through the relationship between law and race, he said. “In terms of skills and learning how to do legal history, that class was really important.”
The initial spark for Votta’s paper came in Professor Elise Boddie’s Reimagining Equal Protection class when Votta was a 2L. Students read the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which held that affirmative action in admissions violated the equal protection clause.
“There was an interesting exchange, for me as a historian, between Justice Thomas’s concurrence and Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, where they go into their interpretations of the history of the Fourteenth Amendment. The thing that struck me is that the folks they were quoting were the white lawmakers who were passing the Fourteenth Amendment”—not the Black Americans who were immediately affected by it, Votta said.
Votta wrote his original paper as a 2L and then refocused it and continued working on it throughout his 3L year. In the paper, Votta relied on the work of James Fox on the Black constitutional conventions.
Votta said he is grateful to Professor Samuel Erman, ’07, for overseeing his research. “He really helped me home in on thinking about: What are the actual contours of the rights?”
The Race, Law, and History Workshop that Erman and Professor Michelle Adams taught brought in “many different scholars to talk about the works they have in progress, and we got to read from many different fields—all sorts of legal scholarship and historical scholarship. That was helpful in seeing all of the ways that you can combine legal history with political history and with intellectual history and do really important and innovative work,” Votta said.
Votta’s PhD work has helped him see the law differently, he said. “Thinking historically, in the way historians do, is something that lawyers don’t always do.”
He pointed to the justices’ debate in Students for Fair Admissions, as it “left out the voices of Black Americans who were pushing for abolition,” he said. “And I think there are reasons for that. There are constraints of what’s considered legitimate versus not legitimate uses of the past, but those aren’t set in stone, and I think we should change them.”
Winning the Dimond Prize, Votta said, provides a boost as he delves deeper into his doctoral studies.
“It’s really meaningful to me to have had people who are experienced academics, who are doing the work that I want to do when I eventually graduate, say this is an important piece of legal historical scholarship of constitutional law and civil rights—and an affirmation that this is a field that matters.”
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