Today was our last day in DC. We arrived at the library in the morning and got right to work on wrapping up our look at the papers. By this point I had developed sincere friendships with the librarians, including Bruce, and AK had to restrain me from asking for the librarians’ signatures.

Last night, Kobylka graced us with the opportunity of brisk St. Patrick’s Day walk down to the Reflecting Pool, the Lincoln Memorial, and then, the White House. I have attached a picture of me with some St. Patrick’s Day dogs in front of the Lincoln Memorial. In terms of the White House, we saw neither Joe Biden nor Niall Horan (I’m not crazy Niall was there performing that night because he’s Irish), which was a bit sad, yet life goes on unfortunately.

Pulling and reading the papers was exhausting yet fascinating. We could pull four boxes at a time from each Justice’s collections and looking through them and taking notes was a process that just took hours of academic reading and absorbing. My brain felt dead and went on autopilot by the end of each day. However, I was able to maintain my sense of humor, which I know Kobylka would have felt lost without.

My research topic is a close look at the relationship between the Supreme Court and the electoral process. With this, I am looking at a lot of reapportionment cases and voting rights cases. One case that piqued my interest as I looked at it in the library was the 1974 case, Richardson v. Ramirez, which was a landmark case that in the majority opinion ruled states have the power to prohibit felons from voting.

The first page of Rehnquist’s first memo to court about the case Richardson v. Ramirez

In looking at Richardson v. Ramirez, I was fascinated by much of the correspondence between the Justices. The decision was 6-3, which is a little over a minimal majority, yet by looking at teh Justice’s correspondence I could see that this majority was not so easy to maintain. William Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion for the case, but for a while, many of his cohorts were displeased with his reasoning in the opinion. They believed he should have solely based his argument on section 2 of the 14th Amendment. However, for a while, much of Rehnquist’s opinion relied on a discussion of ”the interest of the state.” It was not until he removed this argument that his cohorts confidently joined his opinion. As a peek into Richardson v. Ramirez, I have attached the first page of Rehnquist’s first memo to court about the case.

Overall, this experience was monumental and I was encouraged by how while my brain got tired of reading, it did not get tired of the content or the merits to be had from the papers. Now to write my paper 🙂

P.S – if given the chance to take this trip DO IT. If the luxurious Comfort Inn Ballston is not enough, think of the primary research opportunity that it is. I am thrilled and invigorated to get to put into practice all that I learned through this trip.