Nicholas Stephanopoulos
Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Aligning Election Law: global.oup.com/academic/product/al…
- My symposium piece on a new form of PR -- ranked-list proportional representation -- is now up on the Wisconsin Law Review website. RLPR is a hybrid of ranked-choice voting and open-list PR that, I argue, has a number of desirable properties. wlr.law.wisc.edu/wp-content/u...
- I think the resolution of the North Carolina case actually puts the genie back in the bottle. If a Trump-appointed conservative judge wouldn't greenlight changing the rules after the election, in some places but not others, who will? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
- Justice Souter was one of the modern Court's greatest justices on election law issues (behind only Justice Kagan, in my book). In Crawford, he correctly reasoned that heavy voting burdens, even on a small number of people, can't be justified by phantom fears of voter fraud.
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View full threadIn De Grandy, he wrote the most important post-Gingles opinion on Section 2 racial vote dilution claims. As he noted, the logic of this cause of action requires a proportionality ceiling so groups can't sue for super-proportional representation.
- And in Shrink Missouri, he wrote a landmark campaign finance opinion that suggested a powerful new rationale for curbing money in politics: preventing funders from distorting officeholders' positions. This opinion helped inspire my recent book on alignment as an overarching election law principle.
- In Vieth, he understood that partisan gerrymandering is just another species of vote dilution. That's why he argued for applying something like the statutory test for racial vote dilution to this context.
- What a searing indictment -- by a panel including two Trump-appointed judges! "The 2020 redistricting cycle in Alabama ... did not have to turn out this way. We wish it had not, but we have eyes to see the veritable mountain of evidence that it did." electionlawblog.org/wp-content/u...
