UCLA School of Law professor Rick Hasen’s election law scholarship was recently cited in a U.S. Supreme Court opinion in a landmark voting rights case.

Issued on April 29, the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais remade decades of law on the drawing of congressional districts and race that undergirded the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissent that two other members joined.

There, Kagan asserted that the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee rendered “useless” Section 2, a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that protected voting rights. Ever since “the Court invented a new legal standard,” she wrote, “not a single Section 2 suit has successfully challenged such a restriction on voting, however discriminatory in operation.” In doing so, she cited Hasen’s 2025 article in the Yale Law Journal, “The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U.S. Election Law.”

It was hardly the first time that Hasen’s scholarship has been cited by the Supreme Court or elsewhere in the judiciary. The Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law, he is among the nation’s leading scholars of election law and a prominent voice across the media landscape on issues involving voting, constitutional law, and democratic institutions.

A 1991 graduate of UCLA Law, he directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project and was recently named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in recognition of his career impact and to support his work on his forthcoming book Unbent Arc: The Rise and Decline of American Democracy 1964-2024 (Princeton University Press, 2028).

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais, Hasen was an active participant in the national conversation surrounding voting rights and what happens next. This included essays in Slate about Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion and where it stands historically, as well as an opinion piece for MS Now about how the ruling will play out in states run by Democrats. He also spoke in the pages of the Los Angeles Times and on NPR News and KCRW radio, among many other appearances in the media.