Mistaken Identity: The Supreme Court and the Politics of Minority Representation [Book Review]

Abstract

In a series of contentious, confusing, and contradictory opinions beginning with Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Supreme Court has outlawed some but not all congressional and state legislative districts that were designed to ensure that African-American and Latino voters had genuine opportunities to elect candidates of their choice. Citing only Supreme Court opinions and a small part of the huge secondary literature on voting rights and redistricting, Keith Bybee claims that, in voting rights cases, "conservatives" and "progressives" have fundamentally struggled over the definition of "who 'the people' are" (p. 7), but his own analysis and prescriptions are not persuasive. He too readily dismisses or ignores empirical scholarship, disregards many Supreme and lower court opinions that do not fit his scheme, and provides no justification in logic or constitutional law for his key proposal.