Leroy C. Hardy, emeritus professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), passed away on November 2, 2008, at the age of 81. He specialized in California government and politics and was best known as a long-term consultant to state legislators on the subject of the reapportionment of legislative districts.
Professor Hardy taught full time in the CSULB Political Science Department from February 1953 until his retirement in 1986; after which he taught on a part-time basis until the early 1990s. He chaired the department from 1980 to 1984. After leaving the department, he taught in the CSULB Senior University until shortly before his death. Teaching was his first priority, and he was a popular teacher.
Born in Oklahoma and raised in Southern California, Professor Hardy received his BA degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1949, and his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1955. While still a UCLA graduate student working on the reapportionment of legislative districts, he was appointed in 1951 to the research staff of the Republican-controlled State Reapportionment Committee, and his contribution was so widely admired that he was called upon again in 1961 by the Democratic-controlled California legislature. He participated as well in census-induced redistricting in the early 1970s and 1980s, and in the special redistricting forced by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the mid-1960s mandating one man, one vote.
Professor Hardy's ability to work with both parties on reapportionment issues reflected the integrity and responsibility of his approach to those issues. It also reflected enormous attention to detail, especially in his earliest work before the advent of computers, when reapportionment work was extremely time consuming and laborious. Careers of federal and state legislators depended upon this work.
From his vantage point as a reapportionment expert, Professor Hardy aspired to make reapportionment of legislative districts something other than an exercise favoring political incumbents. At first he believed that government would be more disinterested if a city or community were served by several legislators rather than being incorporated into one district.
Subsequently, following heavily politicized (gerrymandered) redistricting in California in the early 1980s, which he criticized, Professor Hardy helped develop an elaborate bottom-up, community-based, and non-partisan reapportionment concept establishing very small but permanent binding units of redistricting to insulate reapportionment from politics as much as possible. These building-block units, which were implemented in state redistricting in Arizona, were designed to be aggregated into compact legislative districts that would respect county and city boundaries. They were designed to make reapportionment immune from incumbent manipulation, and thereby to make party politics more competitive.
Hardy worked to develop the community-based concept, while serving as a senior research associate at the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College, where he collaborated on a series of writings, including Reapportionment Politics (1981), which he edited with Alan Heslop and Stuart Anderson, and Redistricting in the 1980's: A 50-State Survey (1993) with Alan Heslop and George S. Blair. Hardy also wrote two texts for students, California Government (Canfield Press, 4th ed., 1973), and, with Robert Morlan, Politics of California (Dickenson Publishing Co., 1968).
