Election Law Expert Authors Book Criticizing the Supreme Court’s Dominant Role in Shaping Ground Rules for Elections

The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging Equality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore

LOS ANGELES -- From the 2000 presidential election controversy, to the anticipated Supreme Court decisions in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance case and another case challenging the constitutionality of partisan redistricting, to the two dozen lawsuits that roiled the California recall election process, public attention continues to focus on the dominant role that courts have played in recent years in shaping the ground rules for elections in this country.

In his newly released book, The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging Equality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore [New York Press, 256 pages, $40], Richard L. Hasen, Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, takes the first systematic and critical look at the role that courts have come to play in regulating the political process. Dr. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution hails the book as a "major contribution to the field of election law."

Hasen, drawing on the case files of Supreme Court Justices in the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist courts, roots the Supreme Court's intervention in political process cases to the 1962 case Baker v. Carr, in which the Court first agreed to consider claims that a state legislature had violated the Constitution by failing to draw legislative districts with equal populations. 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, concludes 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 v. Gore have been wrongly decided.

Professor Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, is co-author of a leading casebook on election law and is co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal.

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