Friday’s post argued that what the Court did in Louisiana v. Callais is best described as breaking a structural link — a load-bearing connection that was holding up many actions at once, not just the Louisiana map. That post was about what. This post is about why now. Why this case, why this term, why … Read more
Wednesday morning I posted “You Can Get There From Here, Or: The Theorem in the Tagline,” a piece I had been meaning to write for fourteen years. It is a short essay about why McKelvey-Schofield — the result that majority preference cycles can wander anywhere in the policy space once procedural constraints fall away — … Read more
Justice Kagan opens her Callais dissent with a hypothetical. She knows it’s stylized, and she says so. Imagine a state shaped like a rectangle, with one of its six congressional districts a near-perfect circle in the middle. The circle is ninety percent Black. The other five districts, surrounding it, are ninety percent white. Voting is … Read more