The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging Equality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore
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In the first comprehensive study of election law since the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, Richard L. Hasen rethinks the Court's role in regulating elections. Drawing on the case files of the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist courts, Hasen roots the Court's intervention in political process cases to the landmark 1962 case, Baker v. Carr. The case opened the courts to a variety of election law disputes, to the point that the courts now control and direct major aspects of the American electoral process. The Supreme Court does have a crucial role to play in protecting a socially constructed "core" of political equality principles, contends Hasen, but it should leave contested questions of political equality to the political process itself. Under this standard, many of the Court's most important election law cases from Baker to Bush have been wrongly decided. Michigan Law Review "A must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of law and politics. . . . [Hasen s] is an important framework against which election law scholars will react and upon which they will build for some time to come."
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Mighty Platonic Guardians11The Supreme Court of Political Equality142Judicial Unmanageability and Political Equality473Protecting the Core of Political Equality734Deferring to Political Branches on Contested Equality Claims1015Equality, Not Structure138Conclusion: Political Equality and a Minimalist Court157App. 1Twentieth-Century Election Law Cases Decided by the Supreme Court in a Written Opinion166App. 2Justice Goldberg's Proposed Dissent to a Per Curiam Summary Affirmance in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections176Notes189Index221About the Author227
