The Roberts Court has shifted power to the states to determine the boundaries of political power with Blacks and other discrete and insular minorities losing electoral power.

What lessons can we draw from the study of 2011 state legislative redistricting? We find that, on the one hand, predicting partisan gerrymandering is relatively simple: gerrymandering occurs when one party can monopolize redistricting and has an incentive to draw biased maps. One the other hand, our investigations of racial segregation and political geography reveal the intimate links between racial gerrymandering and political gerrymandering and suggest that the Republican Party in 2011 was willing to use racial vote dilution in many states in order to achieve extreme bias. We conclude with an assessment of redistricting reforms in Virginia and “best practices” in preventing partisan gerrymandering.

Shortly after the adoption of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, progressive reformers recognized new threats to minority representation that went beyond minority disenfranchisement and included efforts to dilute minority representation. Progressive justices aligned with the Democratic Party helped to refashion election law to address these evolving shortcomings by reinterpreting the statute as well as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Conservative justices countered by proposing new, restrictive doctrinal positions. But when those positions deviated from the wishes of elected Republicans, they capitulated and instead developed a new right discouraging racial gerrymandering. The pattern of evolving doctrinal positions is best described by the deliberative partnership thesis.