A bill requiring the presentation of a photo ID before one can vote is under consideration in the Maine Legislature. This and other areas where voting rights and the law intersect were topics of discussion for Lee Rowland of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. She spoke at a forum sponsored by the Maine League of Women Voters.
PROGRAM NOTE: This online version professor Lee Rowland's talk contains an extra 10 minutes that was not broadcast, which was edited for length due to time constraints.
Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Ms. Rowland ran the Reno office of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, where she worked on a host of civil liberties and civil rights issues, including election protection, voting rights, and initiative petition law. Among other work, Ms. Rowland sat as the ACLU of Nevada’s designee on the Nevada Supreme Court’s Indigent Defense Commission, received a 2008 award from Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice for her work stopping a planned execution in Nevada, and was certified as class counsel by the federal District Court of Nevada to help represent over 1000 Nevada inmates on claims of unconstitutional levels of medical care. Ms. Rowland has argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and is licensed in the courts of Nevada and New York. In addition to legal work, Ms. Rowland has extensive experience as an advocate, lobbyist, and public speaker. Ms. Rowland is a 2002 graduate of Middlebury College, and a 2005 graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as Managing Technical Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal, staffed the Harvard Journal on Racial and Ethnic Justice and was a reporter for the Harvard Law Record.
This talk was recorded January 11, 2012 at the Maine State House in Augusta.