Welcome to another episode of The Libertarian.

I am Charles C.W. Cook, and I am joined, of course, by the Libertarian himself, Richard Epstein.

Richard, welcome to your own show.

It's always nice to be here,

I should say before we start, that this is a production of the Civitas Institute at the University

of Texas at Austin, and our topic today is gerrymandering. Obviously, this has been in the news

for a while. Various states are engaging in partisan gerrymandering, and we've had some court cases, most recently,

a court case in Texas in which a couple of judges over a pretty vigorous dissent ruled that Texas could not use the map that it had prepared

this summer in 2025, but would have to next year in the midterms go back to the map that was

in operation in 2021. I want to talk about that and the issues that were invoked. But before we do that,

Richard, what is gerrymandering? Well, it started back in the 19th century, and there was a famous map.

Somebody took a salamander and gave it a head by Mr. Jerry, who was running for office,

and showed how the pieces have been cut up into all sorts of strange ways. And the problem caught

on, the definition caught on, because it turns out that politicians in a democratic society

are always looking for an edge. And when you start trying to figure out the edge,

shape turns out to be the dominant feature. This has been accentuated by recent Supreme Court

decisions, of which the Rucho case from 2019 or 2018 is the most important. Because what the

Supreme Court has done in its reapportionment situation, judgment, is it says you cannot

have any equal districts in terms of numbers of partisan and gets upset if the deviations get

something even close to 1%. Most people do not regard that as a really big deal. They don't see

political power moving in very powerful ways with these tiny

differentials. But what the Supreme Court then held in the Rucho case is that it's a political

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