I’m delighted to announce that the Sixth edition of our casebook, with new co-author Nick Stephanopoulos, will be heading to the printer soon, and is available for fall classes. (The ISBN is 978-1-5310-0472-9). There will be a revised teacher’s manual coming soon as well. Instructors who wish to use page proofs for planning fall classes should contact Carolina Academic Press.

I am extremely excited about this new edition, especially the greatly revised chapters on voting rights, partisan and racial gerrymandering, and election administration and remedies. This book is better than ever, thanks to my wonderful co-authors.

It is also up to date, including developments this month at the Supreme Court (the new NC racial gerrymandering case, the summary affirmance in the soft money case, and the cert grant in the NVRA case).

Whether you want to use it for a full election law course, or a seminar on voting rights, campaign finance, election administration or redistricting, I think you will find the materials both comprehensive and student friendly.

As we wrote in our introductory remarks:

The Sixth Edition of this casebook appears twenty-two years after the first edition, written by Dan Lowenstein alone. When Lowenstein wrote, he was one of a half-dozen law professors in the country focusing on issues of election law and democracy. These days, the field has grown so large that there are many casebooks, other books, articles, and journals devoted to the subject. While that is good news for those who wish to study material at the intersection of law and politics, it reflects that election law has been the source of much controversy, not just in academia but in American politics and culture. The boom in interest coincided with the disputed 2000 election, and it does not appear to have dissipated. If anything, people have come to expect that judicial action will be front-and-center in electoral campaigns. This may not reflect well on the health of American democracy, but at least those who study the field will be able to understand the disputes.

The goals of this Sixth Edition of the casebook are the same as Lowenstein’s ambition with the first: to shed more light than heat on a disputed subject; to give students and their instructors a fair presentation of the cases and scholarship in the key areas of election law; to bring in political science evidence with which to evaluate legislative and judicial interventions into democratic processes; and to do all of this in clear language. We have strived to live up to Lowenstein’s example, although we acknowledge this book does not reflect his distinctive voice more evident in the earlier editions.