Travis Crum is an Associate Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Crum’s scholarship explores the relationship between voting rights, race, and federalism. His current project examines the Fifteenth Amendment—which banned racial discrimination in voting—as an independent constitutional provision and critiques that Amendment’s narrow application under contemporary doctrine. He is also investigating the provision of non-English ballots to language minorities and the role of racially polarized voting in the 2020 redistricting process.
Professor Crum’s work on the Voting Rights Act’s bail-in provision was described by the Wall Street Journal as the “blueprint” for the “Obama administration’s new legal strategy to preserve decades of minority-voting rights” in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder striking down the VRA’s coverage formula. Professor Crum’s proposal for an effects-test bail-in provision was incorporated in the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives.