Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Michigan Law Review Online

Abstract

The early commentary on LULAC and Justice Kennedy’s role has highlighted two central points. First, everyone agrees that stasis prevailed in partisan gerrymandering jurisprudence; Kennedy continued to sit on the fence, and consequently LULAC marks no jurisprudential shift on this front. Second, some have been pleasantly surprised by the Voting Rights Act holding, noting that Justice Kennedy—not always the biggest fan of the Act—cast the deciding vote to invalidate the changes to District 23 on vote dilution grounds. While these two holdings are separately interesting, the more important question I want to pursue is what Kennedy’s twin holdings, taken together, mean for the future of voting rights jurisprudence. On this score, we might initially be inclined to applaud Justice Kennedy. His opinion appears to embody a laudably minimalist approach to redistricting jurisprudence. Kennedy shied away from a constitutional ruling, instead finding a statutory footing for the Court’s intervention: he cobbled together an overlapping consensus that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was violated in order to invalidate a part of Texas’s troubling mid-decade redistricting plan, without having to take the unprecedented step of striking down a redistricting plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

First Page

53

Volume

105

Publication Date

2006

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