This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. I'm your host Tom Church and I'm joined as always by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Here at Hoover, Richard is a Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow.

He's also the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU

and is a senior lecturer over at the University of Chicago.

And Richard, we just got a decision, I think a somewhat surprising 5-4 ruling with Kavanaugh on Roberts crossing the aisle, so to speak, in Allen v Milligan, right, to rule against Alabama's recently drawn electoral boundaries well recently I they the court allowed the boundaries to to hold for the

2022 election now to understand this case we have to know what Alabama did here

with its redistricting and talk about the Voting Rights Act and section 2 which the

case rules on but before that of course Richard can you help me get a judicial

background to set up how we even how we even got here yeah I mean look there was a very

long period of time in the United States where all reapportioned decisions were thought to be purely political and all relevant dimensions, and so that the courts would not get into them at all.

The most famous expression of this is a case called

Colgrove and Green decided on 1946 about reapportionment in the state of Illinois and

Justice Frank Fertaubu was at that point the non-interference kind of guy,

said I do not wish to get into a political thicket. They're just too many variables that take place,

and we have to essentially stay out.

Staying out of course means that the dominant party can reinforce its dominance in any

situation in which districting has to take place, whether at the state or the federal level.

And it turns out that you can do an amazing amount of things if you're given that degree of freedom,

which almost gives your incumbent party a get out of free jail card, they're never going to displace.

And this sort of really got more and more anxious in 1962 in a case called Baker v. Cobb, Justice Brennan, who was a student of Justice

Frankfurt when he was at Harvard Law School, essentially turned the tables.

And he said, there's one thing that we can do

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