Law Commons^™

Getting The Math Right, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Over the last 40 years of one person, one vote jurisprudence, the Supreme Court has distilled a stable and predictable test for resolving the basic numerical issue in equal representation: how much population difference between districts is permissible? Yet there remains one area of representation into which the Court has refused to venture: apportionment of Congress. In its only opinion on the mechanics of the decennial of apportionment, the Court deferred to Congress. It deferred because, unlike districting, it could not find a single workable measure for apportionment. But the reason it could not find such a measure was that …