Law Commons^™

Docket Control, Mandatory Jurisdiction, And The Supreme Court's Failure In Rucho V. Common Cause, Carolyn Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper, part of a Symposium on Andrew Coan's book, Rationing the Constitution: How Judicial Capacity Shapes Supreme Court Decision-Making, traces congressional changes to Supreme Court jurisdiction over more than a century, noting that those changes were regularly made in response to concerns about the Court's caseload. To the extent that Coan, and the Court, turn to doctrinal methods of controlling caseloads, such as deferential standards of review, they are overlooking the important congressional role in setting the Court's jurisdiction. The paper concludes by criticizing the recent decision of Rucho v. Common Cause in which the Court held that extreme …

Rucho Is Right – But For The Wrong Reasons, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ended its long struggle to formulate constitutional standards to regulate political gerrymandering by declaring that it was not up to the job. The Court held that it could come up with no manageable standards governing the controversy and that it therefore posed a nonjusticiable political question.

In this brief comment, I attempt defend this outcome. The task is not easy, and I hope that the reader will at least give me some points for degree of difficulty. There is no denying that partisan gerrymandering is a very serious evil and there …