I'm John John Batchew with Professor Richard Epstein, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution,

teaches law at NYU and the University of Chicago and is teaching me and all of everybody listening

how the Supreme Court works in fact here in the 21st century.

We turned to a 6-3 Supreme Court approved a white dominated

by South Carolina's Republican controlled legislature

overruling a lower court that found the map divided Charleston County

into different districts in order to, quote, reduce

black voters political power.

The court, as I understand Richard, has decided, no, it wasn't on the basis of race it was on the basis of partisanship and that's

acceptable is that how it works these days unfortunately yes the decision goes

back to a problem that existed for a very long time.

And so it's sort of the one man, one vote type of rule from Baker v. Carr

left the question as to how it is that you devise district.

And what they did at that particular time

is they had two constraints.

One of the constraints was the population.

And the Supreme Court tends to insist on virtual mathematical

identity so that each district has the same population.

But then there's a huge degree of freedom about how these districts are to be shaped.

And it turns out there's always partisan politics which will shape them in utterly grotesque fashion.

And what the Supreme Court has done essentially is to say,

we keep it very tough to the line on numbers,

...