Panelists for the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act Hearing in Washington, DC on October 14, 2005 Juan Aguilar Juan Aguilar works as a citizen volunteer for the Sunnyside Voter Registration Project. He works on developing and implementing a strategy to get the Hispanic voters in Sunnyside, Washington (Yakima County) get involved in the electoral process. He is part of a team of volunteers who seek out technical and financial assistance to assist the Hispanic population. Mr. Aguilar has worked with the Department of Justice to ensure that monolingual Spanish-language speakers get the assistance they need when voting. J. Gerald Hebert Gerald Hebert is the Executive Director and Director of Litigation of the Campaign Legal Center. For the past ten years, Gerry Hebert has had an active federal court litigation practice specializing in redistricting and voting right issues and has worked on cases in more than two dozen states. Over the last three decades, he has served as legal counsel for parties and amici curiae in numerous redistricting lawsuits, including several cases decided in the Supreme Court of the United States. Prior to his time in solo private practice, Mr. Hebert served in the Department of Justice from 1973-1994 in many supervisory capacities, including Acting Chief, Deputy Chief, and Special Litigation Counsel in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division. Mr. Hebert will remain an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, in Washington, D.C., where, since 1995, he has taught courses on voting rights, election law, and campaign finance regulation. In 1998, he co-taught a course on voting rights law at the University of Virginia School of Law with Professor Pamela Karlan. In 1995, he also taught election law at the American University's Washington College of Law. He has authored a number of law journal articles and other publications on redistricting and the Voting Rights Act. His most recent publications include "Redistricting in the Post-2000 Era", in the George Mason University Law Review, and "The Realists' Guide to Redistricting", published by the American Bar Association's Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice (co-authored). Margaret Jurgensen Margaret Jurgensen has served as the Elections Director of Montgomery County since August 2001. Before Montgomery County, she worked as the Election Commissioner and Court Administrator for Douglas County, NE. She has also worked as the Legislative Staff person to Nebraska State Senators from the Omaha NE area from 1977 to 1988. She has a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She also served in the U.S. Naval Reserve for 6 years. Robert Kengle Robert Kengle served over 20 years in the Department of Justice's Voting Section after joining the Civil Rights Division in 1984 as an Honor Law Graduate of Antioch School of Law. As a trial attorney he litigated minority vote dilution claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, enforcement and preclearance actions under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and constitutional claims of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering under Shaw v. Reno. These cases included Garza v. County of Los Angeles, U.S. v. City of Memphis, Texas v. U.S., King v. State Board of Elections and Vera v. Bush. From 1996 through 1999 he served as a special counsel and acting deputy chief, and he served as a deputy chief from 1999 through April 2005 when he left the Justice Department. He supervised litigation including Section 5 declaratory judgment actions brought by the States of Georgia and Virginia, the Section 203 language minority case involving Passaic County, New Jersey, cases brought under the National Voter Registration Act against the City of St. Louis and Pulaski County, Arkansas, and several bailout actions under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. He worked with the Bureau of the Census in preparation for the 2002 language minority determinations under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act and served a specialist within the Voting Section for statistical and demographic analysis. He was a recipient of the Civil Rights Division's Maceo Hubbard Award and a co-recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Information Technology, among others. Mark Posner (Click here to view Testimony) Mark Posner is currently an adjunct professor at the Washington College of Law at American University and the University of Maryland Law School where he teaches Election Law and Legal Writing. He has also worked as an independent consultant for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Hon. Kathy Patterson, Chair of the Judiciary Committee of the District of Columbia City Council. Prior to his role as a professor, he joined the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice in 1980 and served there until June 2003, specializing in voting rights, police reform, and the rights of the mentally ill. Since June 2003, he has worked as an independent consultant in the areas of voting rights and police reform, and has taught as an adjunct at the University of Maryland Law School and American University’s Washington College of Law. After law school, Professor Posner clerked for the Honorable Harry Pregerson of the United States District Court for the Central District of California and was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Law and the Public Interest in Los Angeles Mr. Posner is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. After graduation from law school. Sam Hirsch Partner, Jenner & Block Sam Hirsch is currently a partner in Jenner & Block’s Washington, DC office. He is a member of the Firm’s Litigation & Dispute Resolution, and Appellate and Supreme Court Practices. Mr. Hirsch’s practice focuses primarily on election law, redistricting, and voting rights. He has represented IMPAC 2000, the Democratic Party’s national redistricting project, as well as the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the Democratic congressional delegations from several of the Nation’s largest states. In the post-2000 redistricting cycle, he has been actively involved in congressional, state-legislative, and local redistricting efforts in more than a dozen states. Mr. Hirsch serves as the liaison to the National Conference of State Legislatures for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law Section. He is the coauthor of the ABA’s monograph on redistricting law, “The Realists’ Guide to Redistricting: Avoiding the Legal Pitfalls,” American Bar Association (2000). He is Associate Editor of the Election Law Journal and authored the lead article in the Journal’s inaugural issue, “Unpacking Page v. Bartels: A Fresh Redistricting Paradigm Emerges in New Jersey,” 1 Election Law Journal 7-24 (2002). More recently, he authored “The United States House of Unrepresentatives: What Went Wrong in the Latest Round of Congressional Redistricting,” 2 Election Law Journal 179-216 (2003). Mr. Hirsch has presented lectures on redistricting and election law at the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Council of State Governments, Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Washington & Lee University. Mr. Hirsch graduated from Rice University in 1984 and received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1993, where he served as Treasurer on the Harvard Law Review. From 1993 to 1994, Mr. Hirsch clerked for Judge Francis D. Murnaghan, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Mr. Hirsch is a member of the D.C. and Maryland bars. Rick Vallely Rick Valelly, a recognized expert on the Voting Rights Act, is currently a Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Before joining the faculty at Swarthmore, Valelly taught as an assistant and associate professor of political science at MIT and as an instructor and assistant professor of political science at the College of the Holy Cross. Valelly has also held visiting teaching appointments at Harvard University in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies and at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Political Science. Professor Vallelly is the author of The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Radicalism in the States: The American Political Economy and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (University of Chicago Press, 1989). The Two Reconstructions received the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book published in 2003 and 2004 in the field of politics and history, awarded by the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association, and it won the 2005 Ralph J. Bunche Prize of the American Political Science Association, which honors excellence in scholarship on racial, ethnic, and cultural pluralism. In academic year 2004-2005, Prof. Valelly served as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. In Spring, 2001, he held a Eugene Lang Faculty Research Professorship from Swarthmore College. In Spring 1997, he received a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His project was selected by the NEH Chairman to form part of a special NEH initiative, the National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity. Prof. Valelly has also held an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for the Study of New England History of the Massachusetts Historical Society (June 1996), a residential research fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C. (Summer 1994), and a residential research fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University (Spring 1992). In 1994, Prof. Valelly was a co-recipient of the Mary Parker Follett Award of the APSA Politics and History Section. The Follett Award was given in recognition of Valelly's article, "Party, Coercion, and Inclusion: The Two Reconstructions of the South's Electoral Politics," Politics & Society (March 1993). Honorable Melvin Watt (D-12-NC) In 1992, Congressman Watt was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina's 12th Congressional District and became one of only two African American members elected to Congress from North Carolina in the 20th century. The 12th District is North Carolina’s most urban congressional district. Currently, Congressman Watt is a member of the House Financial Services Committee where he serves on the Financial Institutions Subcommittee, the Domestic and International Monetary Policy Subcommittee and the Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises Subcommittee. Mel is also on the House Judiciary Committee on which he is the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law. In December of 2004, Mel was unanimously elected Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Jeffrey M. Wice Jeffrey Wice is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Touro Law School in New York where he teaches election law. He is also a practicing attorney specializing in redistricting, census, and voting rights law. During the 1980s, he created the first redistricting program for the Democratic National Committee and served as redistricting counsel to the D.N.C. through the 2000 redistricting process. In 1998, he was appointed as a counsel to President Clinton's members of the U.S. Census Monitoring Board and is currently working on a national redistricting reform project at the National Committee for an Effective Congress. He has also served as the Director of the Washington Office of the New York State Assembly and as a Special Counsel to five New York State Assembly Speakers and currently to the New York State Senate Democratic Leader, Senator David Paterson. Wice divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the George Washington University and the Antioch School of Law. Kent Willis (Click here to view Testimony) Kent Willis is the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. Back to main page