The law of redistricting is built on the assumption that tradeoffs among line-drawing criteria are pervasive. This view helps explain crucial elements of partisan gerrymandering, racial vote dilution, and racial gerrymandering doctrine. This Article is the first to rigorously analyze the existence and extent of redistricting tradeoffs. The Article relies on ensembles of billions of district maps generated randomly by cutting-edge computer algorithms....
No. 4
International organizations frequently use democratic transitional agreements as the primary framework for restoring peace after intrastate conflict. These postconflict peacebuilding efforts often result in transitional peace agreements that include a version of interim governance, typically with some power-sharing component, that aims to end armed conflict and usher in democratic elections after a set period. By examining Sudan’s 2022 Political...
The conventional view of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel for indigent defendants is that its enforcement depends on the political branches to implement the right by appropriating the money to enforce it. But that’s not how enforcement of the modern version of the right started. For more than twenty-five years, between 1938, when Johnson v. Zerbst established a right to appointed counsel for federal defendants, and 1964, when Congress began...
The harmful effects of climate change have already arrived in cities and states across America, with disasters increasing markedly in recent years along with more gradual environmental changes like sea-level rise and drought. To protect populations and natural resources, significant funding will be necessary for preventative measures as well as disaster response.
At present, it is states and ordinary taxpayers who must shoulder the enormous...
This Note argues that the allocations of power within the federal Constitution’s separation-of-powers framework hinder effective governance of environmental issues. The true problem is more than the sum of its parts: Several key failings of domestic environmental law result not from the shortcomings of any given statutory scheme but from the relationship between such statutory schemes, the boundary-defying and factually messy nature of environmental...
This Piece is a call to eliminate the de facto requirement that a law review article conclude with a list of actionable and feasible prescriptions, often law or policy reforms, that respond to the questions or analysis at the heart of the article. Traditionally, this is Part IV of the law review article, in which a scholar is expected to explain how the preceding twenty thousand words can and should bear on how we move forward in the world. These...