This Way to the Egress and Other Reflections on Partisan Gerrymandering Claims in Light of Lulac v. Perry

After winning control of both houses of the legislature and the governorship, Texas Republicans eventually succeeded in redistricting Texas’s congressional seats in 2003, replacing a 2001 court-drawn plan. LULAC v. Perry reviewed a number of challenges to that second redistricting. The decision deals with a multiplicity of issues, including, most importantly, the standard for violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the nature of tests for unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering. While there are some clear holdings in the case, several of them reflect different combinations of Justices in the majority and, since there are six different opinions, it is hard to lay out a clear line of jurisprudence in this case, much less find a consistent theory of political representation that might be used to unify different areas of voting rights case law. Moreover, there are almost as many questions left unresolved by LULAC as there are questions answered. For reasons of space, however, in this essay I will deal only with the aspects of LULAC that are related to partisan gerrymandering claims. (I hope to write about the Section 2 aspects of the case in the future.