UC Davis Law professor Vikram David Amar discusses the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Grant v. Belangia, which invalidated a South Carolina law restricting automatic absentee voting to seniors and created a federal circuit split on the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. Professor Amar contends that the bipartisan panel correctly applied originalist principles to hold that the Constitution strictly forbids age-based discrimination in voting procedures, establishing a sound textual model for eventual Supreme Court review.

Albany Law professor Meredith R. Miller and graduate Grace Ann Porter examine the growing circuit split over the evidentiary standard courts must apply when deciding whether to authorize notice to potential opt-in plaintiffs in FLSA collective actions, tracing the diverging approaches of the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Second, and Ninth Circuits. Professor Miller and Ms. Porter argue that the emerging trend toward heightened scrutiny at the certification stage will practically narrow workers' ability to pursue collective wage and hour claims, because requiring plaintiffs to produce more substantial evidence before discovery both suppresses opt-in participation and creates a circular barrier to gathering the very evidence needed to establish similarity.

NYU law professor Samuel Estreicher comments on a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in which the court bucked a recent trend in lower courts by holding that that parties to private international arbitrations can obtain court-based discovery. Estreicher explains the facts of that case and notes that the court’s decision reinforces a circuit split that might end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.