And now it's time for our daily Bloomberg Law Brief, exploring legal issues in the news. Today, Bloomberg Law host Un Grosso and Greg Sture discussed the Supreme Court taking up a case on partisan jerrymandering in the American electoral system. They speak to Rick Hessen, founder of the Election Law Blog and professor at U c Irvine, and Josh Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky Law School. Rick, will you start by describing the case from Wisconsin that
the justices will be considering. This is one of a number of cases involving partisan jerrymandering that has been working his way up the courts. The claim here is that Wisconsin is basically a fifty fifty state between Democrats and Republicans, but the Republican state legislature drew the lines for their General Assembly in such a skewed way to help Republicans that Republicans are able to capture many more seats than
would be done if it were a fairly drawn district. Josh, the last time the Supreme Court really dealt with this issue was back in twenty four. Can you describe where the court left us after that case? Yeah? Well, the Court didn't answer questions as much as provided more of them. Uh. For justices UH said that there was no standard by
which to test a partisan jymander. That is, courts basically shouldn't be involved in resolving these kinds of cases because it was not of a judicial nature and esteat as a political question. The four other justices, the four so called liberal justice each came up with a standard. Uh. They said, here's a good standard for courts to use,
and we think it's susceptible. And Justice Kennedy was in the middle, and he said, I don't like any of the standards that anyone has proposed so far, but I'm not going to close the door to any future standard emerging. So you had with kind of a four one four decision in which Justice Kennedy holds all the keys to power. If he likes the standards, then maybe we'll have the ability to police partisan darrymandering. If he doesn't, then there'll
be no way for course to do so. So Rick, the Court has been reluctant to take up partisan jerrymandering since that case. Why did they take up this case? This case came up directly from a three judge appeals Court. I'm sorry, three judge district court directly on appeal to the Supreme Court. And when cases come up in this unusual way, when the Supreme Court decides not to hear that case, it means the lower court got the ruling right. And so this was a rare case where a lower
court said, yes, this is a partisan gerrymander. And so if the court decided not to hear that case, it would have sent the signal that yes, courts are in the business of policing these things, but we're not going to tell you what the standard is. And that is Rick Hessen, a professor at u c Irvine, and Josh Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky Law School, speaking
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