Drawing Lines in Quicksand: Courts, Legislatures, and Redistricting

Drawing Lines in Quicksand examines judicial performance in voting rights and redistricting through the lens of institutional policy-making capacity. In so doing the book poses two inquiries - first, how institutionally well-equipped are federal courts to perform their current role in developing redistricting policy? Second, how does the contemporary voting rights enforcement regime, in which legislatures draw district lines under judicial supervision, compare to other institutional alternatives? Jeremy Buchman demonstrates that a common perception of federal courts as severely constrained policy actors does not hold - or at least requires significant qualifications when considering the particulars of voting rights and redistricting.