Voting Rights Act of 1965
In the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement increased pressure on the federal government to protect the voting rights of racial minorities. In 1957, Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction: the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This legislation authorized the Attorney General to sue for injunctive relief on behalf of persons whose Fifteenth Amendment rights were denied, created the Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice to enforce civil rights through litigation, and created the Commission on Civil Rights to investigate voting rights deprivations. Further protections were enacted in the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which allowed federal courts to appoint referees to conduct voter registration in jurisdictions that engaged in voting discrimination against racial minorities.
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
The journal was established in Spring 1966 in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In their first issue the editors of the new publication wrote that the review "is an emblem and achievement of the collaboration" between the Harvard Civil Liberties Research Service, the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, and the Harvard Civil Rights Committee, three newly formed organizations that had recently noticed the dearth of legal material on civil rights:
Still, there is today hardly a journal which regularly and completely dedicates its pages to the civil rights revolution and the modern manifestations of the relation between citizen and state. Nor is there any review steadily providing Southern lawyers with library ammunition. Nor does any publication capitalize on the burgeoning interest in rights and liberties among this new generation of law students. Nor does any review endeavor to link together the students and faculties of the various law schools in such a cooperative enterprise.