Law Commons^™

The Mad Hatter’S Quip: Looking For Logic In The Independent State Legislature Theory, Nicholas Maggio, Foreword By Brendan Buschi

Touro Law Review

The Supreme Court is set to hear a case that threatens the bedrock of America’s democracy, and it is not clear how it will shake out. The cumbersomely named “Independent State Legislature Theory” is at the heart of the case Moore v. Harper, which is before the Supreme Court this term. The theory holds that state legislatures should be free from the ordinary bounds of state judicial review when engaged in matters that concern federal elections. Despite being defeated a myriad of times at the Supreme Court, the latest challenge stems from a legal battle over North Carolina’s redistricting maps. …

Partisan Gerrymandering: The Promise And Limits Of State Court Judicial Review, Norman R. Williams

Marquette Law Review

In 2021, the Oregon Legislature succeeded in redrawing the state’s legislative and congressional districts, but the new redistricting plans were immediately challenged in state court as partisan gerrymanders. The Oregon Supreme Court rejected the challenge to the state legislative map, but its analysis, which accorded significant deference to the legislature’s choices, raised more questions than answers about the appropriate level of scrutiny for state redistricting plans. A special, five-judge court likewise rejected the gerrymandering challenge to the congressional map, and, while its analysis was less deferential, its decision also left unanswered the fundamental question regarding at what point a redistricting …

Candidates Of Their Choice? Paradoxical Impact Of The Voting Rights Act In Virginia, Mark E. Rush

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

Epic Fail: Harkenrider V. Hochul And New York's 2022 Misadventure In "Independent" Redistricting, Richard Briffault

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

A Modern-Day 3/5 Compromise: The Case For Finding Prison Gerrymandering Unconstitutional Under The Thirteenth Amendment, Shana Iden

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

Vestiges of slavery and systemic disenfranchisement of people of color persist in the United States. One of these remnants is the practice of prison gerrymandering, which occurs when government officials count incarcerated individuals as part of the population of the prison’s location rather than the individual’s home district. This Article argues that prison gerrymandering functions as a badge of slavery that should be prohibited under the Thirteenth Amendment.

First, this Article provides background on prison gerrymandering and charts its impact through history, particularly on Black communities. Moreover, this Article analyzes how litigation under the Fourteenth Amendment has not yielded meaningful …

Rucho In The States: Districting Cases And The Nature Of State Judicial Power, Chad M. Oldfather

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

Rounding Up The Three-Fifths Clause: Eradicating Prison Gerrymandering In The South, Abigail N. Falk

Pepperdine Law Review

This Comment examines the phenomenon of prison gerrymandering, a practice that involves counting prisoners as residents of the counties where their state correctional facilities are located—rather than in their home communities—for redistricting and representational purposes. This practice of counting inflates the voting power of rural, white districts with large prison complexes and diminishes the voting power of minority communities. Prison gerrymandering has become especially pervasive across southern states while many of the South’s northern counterparts have eradicated this practice through legislative reform. This Comment proposes a solution to stop prison gerrymandering in the South, arguing a strategy to produce a …

Making It Harder To Challenge Election Districting, Erwin Chemerinsky

Fordham Law Voting Rights and Democracy Forum

No abstract provided.

Ranked-Choice Voting As Reprieve From The Court-Ordered Map, Benjamin P. Lempert

Michigan Law Review

Thus far, legal debates about the rise of ranked-choice voting have centered on whether legislatures can lawfully adopt the practice. This Note turns attention to the courts and the question of remedies. It proposes that courts impose ranked-choice voting as a redistricting remedy. Ranked-choice voting allows courts to cure redistricting violations without also requiring that they draw copious numbers of districts, a process the Supreme Court has described as a “political thicket.” By keeping courts away from the fact-specific, often arbitrary judgments involved in redistricting, ranked-choice voting makes for the redistricting remedy that best protects the integrity of the judicial …

Political Redistricting In The Post-Rucho Era, Robert Fisch

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

In January of 2011, the infamous “Snake by the Lake” was born.2 Stretching along the southern coast of Lake Erie, the 9th Congressional District of Ohio covers a 120 mile-long thin strip of the state.3 The district is less than one mile wide at certain locations and is considered contiguous, a state constitutional requirement for congressional districts,4 only because the “snake” passes through portions of Lake Erie.5 In creating the district, the Ohio Republican Party, the majority party in the state legislature at the time, drew the boundaries with the intent to limit the voting power of the Democrats in …

The Shaw Claim: The Rise And Fall Of Colorblind Jurisprudence, Molly P. Matter

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Question For Another Day: Hooker V. Illinois State Board Of Elections And Its Effect On The Vitality Of Citizen Ballot Initiatives And Redistricting Reform In Illinois, Thomas Q. Ford

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Like most states, Illinois is no stranger to political gerrymandering. Since 2010, redistricting reformers have made repeated efforts to change the way Illinois's political maps are drawn, essentially by minimizing or eliminating the role lawmakers play in the process. Polls show the vast majority of Illinoisans support such a change. Reformers have chosen Illinois's citizen ballot initiative as their vehicle to amend the redistricting process, but every proposed initiative has been struck down in court before reaching voters. Most recently, the Illinois Supreme Court rejected a proposed initiative in Hooker v. Illinois State Board of Elections. This Note argues …

Keynote Address: Judging The Political And Political Judging: Justice Scalia As Case Study, Richard L. Hasen

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This is a revised version of a Keynote Address delivered at “The Supreme Court and American Politics,” a symposium held October 17, 2017 at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. In this Address, Professor Hasen considers through the lens of Justice Scalia’s opinions the role that views of the political process play, at least rhetorically, in how Supreme Court Justices decide cases. It focuses on Justice Scalia’s contradictory views on self-dealing and incumbency protection across a range of cases, comparing campaign finance on the one hand to partisan gerrymandering, voter identification laws, political patronage, and ballot access rules on the other. …

The History Of Redistricting In Georgia, Charles S. Bullock Iii

Georgia Law Review

In his memoirs, Chief Justice Earl Warren singled out
the redistrictingcases as the most significant decisions of
his tenure on the Court., A review of the changes
redistricting introduced in Georgia supports Warren's
assessment. Not only have the obligations to equalize
populations across districts and to do so in a racially fair
manner transformed the makeup of the state's collegial
bodies, Georgia has provided the setting for multiple cases
that have defined the requirements to be met when
designing districts.
Other than the very first adjustments that occurred in
the 1960s, changes in Georgia plans had to secure
approval from …

Did The African-American Electorate Unintentionally Help Elect Donald Trump President?, C. Daniel Chill

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Gerrymandering And The Constitutional Norm Against Government Partisanship, Michael S. Kang

Michigan Law Review

This Article challenges the basic premise in the law of gerrymandering that partisanship is a constitutional government purpose at all. The central problem, Justice Scalia once explained in Vieth v. Jubilerer, is that partisan gerrymandering becomes unconstitutional only when it “has gone too far,” giving rise to the intractable inquiry into “how much is too much.” But the premise that partisanship is an ordinary and lawful purpose, articulated confidently as settled law and widely understood as such, is largely wrong as constitutional doctrine. The Article surveys constitutional law to demonstrate the vitality of an important, if implicit norm against …

Redistricting Reform In Wisconsin To Curtail Gerrymandering: The Wisconsin Impartial Citizens Redistricting Commission, Joseph W. Bukowski

Marquette Law Review

After an extremely partisan gerrymander in 2011, Wisconsin needs redistricting reform in order to eliminate partisan politics from the process. Now more than ever, momentum for change has reached its peak: the Wisconsin legislative maps as drawn in 2011 were ruled unconstitutional in Whitford v. Gill; the Supreme Court has recently ruled in favor of states implementing independent redistricting commissions; and nearly half of the states in the United States are beginning to use independent commissions for redistricting. This Comment proposes a unique approach for Wisconsin to adopt in order to curtail gerrymandering: the Wisconsin Impartial Citizens Redistricting Commission (WICRC). …

The Current State Of Election Law In The United States, Mark Rush

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Political Gerrymandering: Was Elbridge Gerry Right, C. Daniel Chill

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Quick And Dirty: The New Misreading Of The Voting Rights Act, Justin Levitt

Florida State University Law Review

The role of race in the apportionment of political power is one of the thorniest problems at the heart of American democracy, and reappears with dogged consistency on the docket of the Supreme Court. Most recently, the Court resolved a case from Alabama involving the Voting Rights Act and the appropriate use of race in redistricting. But though the Court correctly decided the narrow issue before it, the litigation posture of the case hid the fact that Alabama is part of a disturbing pattern. Jurisdictions like Alabama have been applying not the Voting Rights Act, but a ham-handed cartoon of …

November Madness: A Proposal For Representative Democracy Brackets To Eliminate The Undue Influence Of Money On Elections, Daniel P. Valentine

Texas A&M Law Review

This Comment proposes Representative Democracy Brackets, a multi-level manner of choosing candidates in which all voters have an equal voice, but which by its structure reduces the effect of mass marketing in favor of a focus on forming and evaluating interpersonal relationships. By implementing Representative Democracy Brackets, a state or the United States can achieve the twin benefits of decreasing the undue effects of political spending and increasing the quality of the resulting decisions. The proposed brackets winnow the pool of voters until it is small enough to make an informed decision.

This Comment defines the problem by reviewing the …

One Significant Step: How Reforms To Prison Districts Begin To Address Political Inequality, Erika L. Wood

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Skyrocketing rates of incarceration over the last three decades have had profound and lasting effects on the political power and engagement of local communities throughout the United States. Aggressive enforcement practices and mandatory sentencing laws have an impact beyond the individuals who are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. These policies have wide-ranging and enduring ripple effects throughout the communities that are most heavily impacted by criminal laws, predominantly urban and minority neighborhoods. Criminal justice policies broadly impact everything from voter turnout and engagement, to serving on juries, participating in popular protests, census data, and the way officials draw legislative districts. The …

Election Law And Government Ethics, Christopher R. Nolen, Jeffrey S. Palmore

University of Richmond Law Review

This article surveys developments in Virginia election and government ethics laws for 2014 and 2015, with an emphasis on legislative developments. The focus is on those statutory developments thathave significance or general applicability to the implementation of Virginia's election and ethics laws.

Mapping The Treasure State: What States Can Learn From Redistricting In Montana, Caitlin Boland Aarab, The Honorable Jim Regnier

Montana Law Review

No abstract provided.

In Re 2012 Legislative Districting: Maryland High Court Decision Exemplifies Lackluster Federal Guidance On Redistricting, Matthew Lagarde

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Recent History Of Gerrymandering In Florida: Revitalizing Davis V. Bandemer And Florida’S Constitutional Requirements On Redistricting, Devon Ombres

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

A Half-Century Of Virginia Redistricting Battles: Shifting From Rural Malapportionment To Voting Rights To Public Participation, Micah Altman, Michael P. Mcdonald

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Right Choice For Elections: How Choice Voting Will End Gerrymandering And Expand Minority Voting Rights, From City Councils To Congress, Rob Richie, Andrew Spencer

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Could The Best Of Tightrope Walkers Manage To Walk The Line Between Race-Consciousness And Race-Predominance? An Analysis Of Race-Based Districting In Light Of Miller V. Johnson, Sean Simpson

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Community As A Redistricting Principle: Consulting Media Markets In Drawing District Lines, Jason C. Miller

Indiana Law Journal

With the 2011 redistricting process poised to commence across the country, debates are raging as to who should draw district lines, how to keep those individuals from drawing them for partisan advantage, and the best way to draw minority districts. This paper addresses the largely overlooked area of media markets. Districts drawn to conform with media markets experience higher voter turnout. Moreover, linking a city and its economically-connected suburbs together is simply common sense. Discussing the impact of district conformity, or lack thereof, with media market boundaries on campaign strategy, news reporting, voter participation, grassroots organizing, and candidate recruitment, this …