A rash of legal challenges to a core piece of US civil rights legislation is threatening the foundations of nearly half a century of laws to combat racial discrimination.
Republican-led state legislatures from Florida and Texas to Alaska have engineered a series of legal showdowns with the federal government over the 1965 Voting Rights Act that, following several court rulings last week, appear likely to end up before a US supreme court which has already hinted it is ready to revisit the heart of the law.
