"Frankfurter's Curse"

Alan Ehrenhalt offers this essay in Governing magazine, which begins: "Fifty-eight years ago, Justice Felix Frankfurter told his brethren to stay out of the business of drawing political maps. “Courts ought not to enter this political thicket,” Frankfurter warned in Colegrove v. Green. “The fulfillment of this duty cannot be judicially enforced.” Initially, they listened to him. The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Colegrove’s assertion that Illinois congressional districts were grossly unequal in population, were based on obsolete census data and were therefore unconstitutional. Your argument is reasonable, the court in effect said, but we don’t go there." The article interestingly both praises Felix Frankfurter's calls for courts to stay out of the political thicket and argues "Redrawing lines in the middle of the decade, as happened recently in Texas and Colorado, is an extra-legal form of mischief that might actually be curable by judicial decree."

Thanks to Ed Feigenbaum for the pointer.

Posted by Rick Hasen at January 6, 2004 07:09 AM