Portside

With Gill v. Whitford, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the most important case in decades dealing with how Americans are represented in Congress and state legislatures.

As Justice Kennedy writes: “Yet the law responds to proper evidence and valid inferences in ever-changing circumstances, as it learns more about ways in which its commands are circumvented.” This is a strong signal to lower courts not to apply prior cases formalistically or mechanically, but to ferret out unconstitutional racial gerrymanders that take ever-evolving form.