Professor Ellis discusses his essay Polley V. Ratcliff: A New Way To Address an Original Sin? on a fascinating court case, recently resolved, involving kidnapping, slavery, and freedom which might serve as a roadmap for a type of Truth and Reconciliation style reparation.
Atiba R. Ellis is a Professor of Law at Marquette University Law School. His primary research focuses on how law, racial oppression, and class-based oppression interact to abridge and deny the right to vote for communities on the margins of American democracy. He has written about the socioeconomic dimensions of voter suppression, situated felon disenfranchisement laws as enforcing a political underclass, and analyzed the scope of legal personhood. His interdisciplinary work spans doctrinal legal analysis, critical political theory, legal history, and innovative legal pedagogy. Professor Ellis’s current research focuses on how ideologically driven conceptions of “wrongful voters” diminish the right to vote.
