Election Law

The Supreme Court and Election Law: Court Intervention in the Political Process Continues

Today's Washington Post preview of the Supreme Court's upcoming term quotes the national legal director of the ACLU stating "potentially the big issue of the term is going to be the Supreme Court's impact on the political system." This term, the Court will decide the McCain-Feingold case and a potentially very important case on partisan gerrymandering, Veith v. Jubelirer.

This term is not much different from other terms over the last 40 years at the Supreme Court. I offer a critical examination of the history of the Supreme Court's intervention in the political process in The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging Equality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore. The book's scheduled publication date is November 1, but NYU Press has just posted the book's Table of Contents and Introduction. The introduction includes the following statistics:

In the period 1901–1960, the Court decided an average of 10.3 election law cases per decade with a written opinion. During the period 1961–2000, that number jumped to 60 per decade. Figure I-1 shows the trend. The numbers are equally dramatic in Figure I-2, which displays the percentage of election law cases on the Court’s docket. In the 1901–1960 period, on average only 0.7 percent of cases the Court decided by written opinion were election law cases. During the 1961–2000 period, that percentage increased seven and one-half times to an average 5.3 percent of cases.

(footnote omitted)

Posted by Rick Hasen at October 6, 2003 11:13 PM