Outgoing U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, whose departure from the Justice Department was announced earlier this month, told the New York Times his biggest regret as the federal government’s top trial lawyer was losing in a major voting rights case, Shelby County v. Holder.
“There are some powerful real-world consequences that followed very quickly from that decision,” Verrilli said, in an interview published over the weekend. “It was an iconic statute and an important part of American history. That was a tough loss.”
The court’s 2013 decision gutted a provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that determined which states with a history of racially discriminatory voting laws needed federal approval for implementing new elections procedures. Since the decision, there has been a flood of new voting restrictions passed by states that were formally covered by the law. Some are being challenged in major court cases and legal observers believe the issue will return to the Supreme Court.