Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. nicholas-stephanopoulos.com/
Joined March 2011
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3 Oct 2024
🚨Today is publication day for my book, "Aligning Election Law"!
The book argues that promoting alignment between governmental outputs and popular preferences should be an overarching goal of election law.
You can buy the book at the link below.
global.oup.com/academic/prod…
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Will the defenders of the Virginia supreme court’s redistricting decision now denounce this ruling?
Here the Florida supreme court fails to lift a finger against a blatant violation of the FL constitution, which prohibits partisan intent in redistricting.
Jun 10
BREAKING: The Florida Supreme Court greenlights the GOP's newly enacted gerrymander for use in the 2026 midterms, despite the state's voter-approved ban on partisan gerrymandering.
With the new map, Republicans could gain up to four more seats in Congress. democracydocket.com/news-ale…
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So now the EEOC has the veneer of an OLC opinion not to enforce a statute it was ignoring anyway.
Stop the presses!
The Department of Justice has issued an opinion to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) that its guidelines about disparate-impact liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act are unconstitutional. The Office of Legal Counsel found that EEOC’s guidelines pressured employers to engage in racial discrimination.
"Despite trying to promote equality, EEOC's disparate impact liability interpretation under Title VII actually fosters the very discrimination its guidelines seek to address," said Acting Attorney General @DAGToddBlanche. "This opinion will now allow businesses to hire based on performance, restoring equal opportunities in the American workplace."
🔗: justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-d…
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Callais: We’re not changing the test for discriminatory intent claims.
AL district court: Okay, we find discriminatory intent.
SCOTUS tonight: You misread Callais. We’re reversing you.
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NY is the perfect place to try the strategy @goldzimer and I outlined a few years ago: redistricting with the goal of NATIONAL partisan fairness.
slate.com/news-and-politics/…
Politico: New York Democrats push redistricting amendment, joining national battle
“Democrats have finalized their plans for a state constitutional amendment to change New York’s redistricting process — joining a national battle over drawing congressional boundaries.”
“The changes would enable Democrats to shift as many as four Republican-held House seats to their column in the 26-member delegation — giving the party a slight edge in a state with several swing districts.”
politico.com/news/2026/06/01…
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NY has enough seats to impact the national balance of power.
And aiming for national fairness is likely to be more appealing to voters (who have to approve the plan) than authorizing aggressive gerrymandering no matter what.
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The WI Supreme Court agreed to hear our case alleging that the congressional map is an anticompetitive gerrymander.
Note that this *isn't* a partisan gerrymandering challenge; our grievance is the map's suppression of competition (not its partisan skew).
electionlawblog.org/?p=15647…
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The DOJ literally filed the same claim a few months ago - and lost 9-0 at the Supreme Court.
Again, Callais didn’t change the law of racial gerrymandering. So districts that were valid then (because party, not race, predominated) are still valid now.
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These are major problems in theory - except, in practice, Congress can resolve them all.
Congress can pick some criteria and exclude others, and just set a fairness threshold that can't be exceeded.
Redistricting tradeoffs are also often overstated. See papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.….
Ban gerrymandering. It sounds so obvious. So simple. Of course we should do it.
Except, there’s just one problem. What is a gerrymander, anyway?
You may think you know it when you see it. But are you so sure? How would you measure it?
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A nice @ElectionClinic win: Quincy has to count 1000 voter signatures it rejected due to "illegibility" - even though voters' printed names were next to their messier signatures.
(This was on an initiative petition to rescind a pay raise for the mayor.)
electionlawblog.org/?p=15639…
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We can be more judgmental here: Republican mid-decade gerrymandering has eliminated the unbiased House of 2022-2024 and replaced it with a chamber significantly skewed in favor of Republicans.
From a democratic perspective, this is something to condemn, not celebrate.
May 22
NEW: Here's a different way of visualizing the House battleground & the impact of redistricting.
Republicans have shifted the tipping point seat 9 points right. Just beyond that, Dems have few opportunities. claude.ai/public/artifacts/5…
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Nicholas Stephanopoulos retweeted
May 20
I have long argued that we should give more weight in redistricting reform to the importance of competitive districts. You often hear that "the big sort" makes it difficult to create competitive districts.
In an article with @ProfNickStephan, "Districting and Competition," we make use of simulated districting to show that we could have twice as many competitive districts without any sacrifice in traditional districting criteria. That would make the House more responsive to shifts in voter preferences and reduce the extremism associated with safe seats.
Link in reply
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Here's a new essay by @RickPildes and me, forthcoming in @PennLRev, on districting and competition (link in next tweet).
We compare the competitiveness of enacted U.S. House plans to that of maps generated by a computer algorithm.
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Our main finding is that enacted plans are *much* less competitive. Without any sacrifice in terms of traditional criteria, we could roughly *double* the number of competitive districts. This would lead to a much more responsive, more accountable House.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
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In an article we’ll post soon, @RickPildes and I look into this topic: to what extent redistricting is responsible for diminished competition (as opposed to geographic sorting and other factors).
nytimes.com/interactive/2026…
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The short answer is that redistricting roughly HALVES the expected number of competitive districts compared to maps created without considering election results.
That is, we could have twice as many competitive districts (without any cost in terms of traditional criteria).
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For more, see this ELB post of mine.
electionlawblog.org/?p=15620…
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Update: Cohn & Washington say they “reran the simulations without consideration of race.” If so, then they’re not just using the off-rack ALARM ensembles and their maps (unlike the ALARM ones) were actually produced without any race-related parameter.
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For more, see this ELB post of mine.
electionlawblog.org/?p=15620…
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Update: Cohn & Washington say they “reran the simulations without consideration of race.” If so, then they’re not just using the off-rack ALARM ensembles and their maps (unlike the ALARM ones) were actually produced without any race-related parameter.
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