Katz received her
B.A in history
summa cum laude from
Yale College in 1991, and her
J.D. in 1994 from
Yale Law School, where she was articles editor of the
Yale Law Journal. Katz has been described as "a liberal law professor and a big fan of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965," describing the act as "sacred." However, she has also said that
Congress should rework the current VRA,
Richard L. Hasen described this as "remarkable" because of Katz's past defenses of the constitutionality of the
VRA's section 5. Katz was a critic of the Supreme Court decision in
Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder in 2009, stating that its narrow statutory, rather than constitutional, ruling was "an improbable one" that "allows just everybody involved in the case to declare victory." Katz is a critic of the Supreme Court's "
congruence and proportionality" test for the
congressional power of enforcement of the
Fourteenth and
Fifteenth amendments, arguing in her 2003 article
Reinforcing Representation that the framers of these Reconstruction amendments intended Congress to have broader power. In Katz's 2009 article
Withdrawal: The Roberts Court and the Retreat from Election Law, Katz examined four important election law decisions of the
Roberts Court (
Lopez Torres,
Washington State Grange,
Crawford, and
Riley) and criticized the Court's "retreat from its longstanding role as the primary guardian of voting rights" as "coming close to embracing empty
formalism." == Personal life ==