Roger Clegg and Jeff Manza, "A Debate on Felon Voting Rights"

Roger Clegg is President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity. He focuses on legal issues arising from civil rights laws--including the regulatory impact on business and the problems in higher education created by affirmative action. A former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Clegg held the second highest positions in both the Civil Rights Division (1987-91) and in the Environment and Natural Resources Division (1991-93). He has held several other positions at the U.S. Justice Department, including Assistant to the Solicitor General (1985-87), Associate Deputy Attorney General (1984-85), and Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy (1984). Clegg is a graduate of Yale University Law School (1981).

Jeff Manza (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley 1995) is Professor of Sociology and the former Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University.  Before coming to NYU, he taught at Penn State (1996-98) and Northwestern (1998-2006), where he served as the Associate Director and then Acting Director of the Institute for Policy Research.  His teaching and research interests lay at the intersection of inequality, political sociology, and public policy.  In collaboration with Christopher Uggen, he has been involved in a long-term project that has examined the causes and consequences of felon disenfranchisement in the United States; their book Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (Oxford University Press 2006) is the standard work on the topic, and Manza and Uggen have provided advice and expert testimony to a variety of political organizations, courts, and legislative bodies dealing with the right to vote for convicted and former felons.

This event was recorded on October 17, 2013. It was moderated by Lecturer in Law Lisa Noller, and sponsored by BLSA, Defenders, and The Federalist Society.