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In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court rejected the extreme proposition that state legislatures operate free from state constitutional constraints and judicial review when they regulate federal elections. The Court, however, left open the possibility that a state court might run afoul of the federal Constitution if, in striking down or construing state election law, it exceeds “the ordinary bounds of judicial review.” This Article explores the potential scope of that exception, and it proposes arguments and strategies to guard against undue and disruptive federal court intrusion on state election law. In particular, the Article relies on longstanding principles of federalism to develop substantive and procedural arguments that insist on federal court deference to state courts’ interpretation and application of their own law.

It has been five years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause closed the door on federal claims challenging partisan gerrymandering, declaring them nonjusticiable political questions. Scholarly literature, since then, has focused primarily on where the Court went wrong in abdicating its responsibility and, to a lesser extent, how the Court got Rucho right. However, an under-addressed feature of Rucho is what Justice Elena Kagan explicitly and implicitly stated in her dissent; that is, the role of judicial federalism before and after Rucho and the influence of state courts in developing partisan gerrymandering doctrine as a matter of state constitutional law.

Justice Kagan’s dissent explicitly reminded the majority that if the state courts were capable of crafting appropriate standards to address partisan gerrymandering, so too was the Court. The problem, of course, was that the number of state court rulings addressing partisan gerrymandering at the time were in short supply. Implicitly, Justice Kagan then suggested that the Court could and should have consulted, borrowed, and adopted the state versions of neutral and objective standards as a source to guide the Court towards crafting a workable federal version. She, however, failed to identify or reference prior instances when the Court looked to the state courts to educate federal constitutional law. This Essay draws attention to how Justice Kagan’s dissent should be understood as foundational support for both the process of percolation and practice of federalization.

The percolation of state constitutional doctrines on partisan gerrymandering offers the Court a rich source of doctrine that will clarify the neutral and objective principles necessary to effectively adjudicate such sensitive political questions in the future. As such, the Court will be positioned to federalize those state doctrines, if it chooses to do so, in order to inform, guide, and support the creation of a federal partisan gerrymandering jurisprudence.

Over the last fifty years, the Republican Party has gradually claimed a majority of state legislative seats and chambers. What explains this? Scholars point to Republican grassroots mobilization of conservative voters in the late-twentieth century. This Essay adds another explanation: Republicans win disproportionate state legislative seat shares by winning rural districts by narrow, efficient margins and by changing state legislative redistricting practices, sometimes by state constitutional amendment. This Essay recounts this history, noting how in the mid-twentieth century, rural-dominated state legislatures failed to mandate fair, regular reapportionment, prompting the Supreme Court in 1964 to force the states to reapportion their legislatures and entrench fair redistricting and voting rights provisions in their state constitutions. Reapportionment added conservative, suburban districts, expanding Republicans’ state legislative seat share in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. With subsequent urban-rural polarization and realignment, Republicans began winning rural districts by narrow, efficient margins, while Democrats won urban districts by wide, inefficient margins, letting Republicans win a greater statewide legislative seat share than popular vote share. Insulated from the popular vote, especially in competitive states, Republican state legislators entrenched their seats by changing elections and redistricting practices, sometimes through state constitutional reform that weakened earlier voting rights and redistricting provisions.

Judges matter. The opinions of a few impact the lives of many. Judges romanticize their own impartiality, but apathy in the face of systems of oppression favors the status quo and clears the way for conservative agendas to take root. The lifetime appointments of federal judges, the deliberate weaponization of the bench by reactionary opponents of the New Deal and progressive social movements, and the sheer inertia of judicial self-restraint have led to the conservative capture of the courts. By contrast, empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden renders substantive justice possible and leaves room for unsuccessful litigants to accept unfavorable outcomes. But some judges—movement judges—bring more to the bench than just empathy, raging against systemic injustice with an understanding of its burdens on real human lives. This Article argues that we need movement judges to realize the abolitionist and democracy-affirming potential of the Constitution. Although the judiciary is often described as the “least democratic” of the three branches of government, it has the potential to be the most democratic. With movement judges, the judiciary can become a force for “We the People.”

Aaron Dozeman is a law clerk to the Honorable Joan H. Lefkow on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Andrew Moshirnia is an Associate Professor and Director of Educ...

We have entered the era dominated by a dogmatic textualism—albeit one that is fracturing, as illustrated by the three warring original public meaning opinions in the blockbuster sexual orientation case, Bostock v. Clayton County. This Article provides conceptual tools that allow lawyers and students to understand the deep analytical problems faced and created by the new textualism advanced by Justice Scalia and his heirs. The key is to think about choice of text—why one piece of text rather than another—and choice of context—what materials are relevant to confirm or clarify textual meaning. Professors Eskridge and Nourse apply these concepts to evaluate the new textualism’s asserted neutrality, predictability, and objectivity in its canonical cases, as well as in Bostock and other recent textual debates.

The authors find that textual gerrymandering—suppressing some relevant texts while picking apart others, as well as cherry-picking context—has been pervasive. Texts and contexts are chosen to achieve particular results—without any law-based justification. Further, this Article shows that, by adopting the seemingly benign “we are all textualists now” position, liberals as well as conservatives have avoided the key analytic questions and have contributed to the marginalization of the nation’s premier representative body, namely, Congress. Today, the Supreme Court asks how “ordinary” populist readers interpret language (the consumer economy of statutory interpretation) even as the Court rejects the production economy (the legislative authors’ meaning).

Without returning to discredited searches for ephemeral “legislative intent,” we propose a new focus on legislative evidence of meaning. In the spirit of Dean John F. Manning’s suggestion that purposivists have improved their approach by imposing text-based discipline, textualists can improve their approach to choice of text and choice of context by imposing the discipline of what we call “republican evidence”—evidence of how the legislative authors explained the statute to ordinary readers. A republic is defined by law based upon the people’s representatives; hence the name for our theory: “republican evidence.” This Article concludes by affirming the republican nature of Madisonian constitutional design and situating the Court’s assault on republican evidence as part of a larger crisis posed by populist movements to republican democracies today.

In a world in which liberals and conservatives disagree about almost everything, there is one important point on which surprising numbers of liberals and conservatives agree: They view the Court’s modern substantive due process decisions as repeating the constitutional wrongs of Lochner. In this Article, we draw on the history of modern substantive due process cases to refute the Lochner objection and to show how these cases demonstrate the democratic potential of judicial review often questioned in contemporary debates over court reform.

In the late 1930s, the Court repudiated Lochner while affirming the importance of judicial review in securing our constitutional democracy. In Carolene Products Footnote Four, the Court famously staked out a continuing role for “more searching judicial inquiry” in cases where “prejudice . . . tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities.” Yet our understanding of the Carolene Products framework dates not to the 1938 decision but instead to the 1980s. In Democracy and Distrust, John Hart Ely developed Footnote Four into a liberal theory of representation-reinforcing judicial review that endorsed decisions protecting certain rights— voting, speech, and equal protection, specifically Brown v. Board of Education— and repudiated decisions protecting other rights—specifically substantive due process. Ely published his attack on substantive due process in 1980, just as conservatives elected President Reagan to overturn Roe v. Wade.

With the benefit of the intervening forty years, this Article revisits and reassesses Ely’s now-canonical interpretation of the Carolene Products framework. We answer the “Lochner objection” by showing how modern substantive due process claims were candidates for close judicial scrutiny in the Carolene Products framework; how the claimants’ strategies of “speaking out” and “coming out” were efforts to be heard in democratic politics; and how bottom-up mobilization around courts can be democracy-promoting in ways that Ely did not imagine. In short, we show that Ely had the big idea that judicial review could be democracy-promoting, but he argued his case on faulty premises. Democracy and Distrust bore significant influence of the traditions and the cultural forces Ely argued against. We show what Ely missed, not because we imagine federal courts are now likely to act as they did in the 1970s, but rather because Ely’s framing of these cases has become dominant and shapes the ways Americans continue to debate the role of courts. We examine the arguments of the claimants in the modern substantive due process cases—then unrepresented in positions of legal authority—and reason about their cases in light of scholarship on the ways family structures citizenship, and on the different roles of courts in a democracy, that has evolved in the four decades since Ely wrote.

What might this reconsideration of the modern substantive due process cases suggest about the ongoing debate over the role of federal courts in a constitutional democracy? This Article does not engage with the particulars of court reform, but it does shed light on certain fundamental premises of that debate. Our analysis rules out one commonly cited justification for reform: that judicial restrictions on legislative sovereignty are by definition antidemocratic and that the modern substantive due process cases are the classic illustration. We show the many ways in which judicial intervention in these cases was democracy-promoting. As one looks at concrete lines of cases and structural features of courts, one can ask about the democracy-promoting and democracy-inhibiting ways that courts perform and pose more discriminating questions about the goals of court reform—whether to adopt reforms that make courts more independent, less polarized, more open, and more democratically responsive, or to limit their role in all or certain areas of a democratic order.

Adam Littlestone-Luria is a third-year student at New York University School of Law.

Elections, Political Parties, and Multiracial, Multiethnic Democracy: How the United States Gets It Wrong

Lee Drutman