Students Get Chance to Shape Congressional Districts After the Census
Columbia Law School Professor Nathaniel Persily to Oversee Work That Could Help States Avoid Years of Expensive Lawsuits Sparked by Partisan Boundaries
New York, Jan. 5, 2011—Students in one Columbia Law School class will be able to do more than talk about what happens when Congressional districts are redrawn following the census. They may be the ones who are actually drawing the lines.
The new class starting later this month will introduce students to the law and politics behind redistricting and map “legally defensible” Congressional districts that will be posted online for states to use, according to Professor Nathaniel Persily, left, who will teach the class.
“This has never been done before,” said Persily, the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, who was appointed by courts to redraw district lines in New York, Georgia and Maryland following the 2000 census.
“There are many places that offer election law courses and talk about redistricting, but no place where students get their hands dirty and learn the technology.”
Redistricting is inevitably a partisan process, where the party that controls a state capital can, following the U.S. census every decade, redraw election districts that can solidify their power base. At the same time, however, attention must be paid to shifts in population and demographics so as not to run afoul of the Voting Rights Act.
Often, the failure to account for a growing minority population or attempts to gerrymander and limit that population’s influence can spark lengthy and expensive court challenges. Persily said this non-partisan project could obviate such litigation.
“When courts call in experts to redraw maps, it can get very expensive,” Persily said. “If we have these maps already drawn on the web, it can save states millions of dollars.”
As part of the class, students will take a three-day training session before the semester starts to be trained in the complex software that will crunch millions of pieces of data and meld it with geographic information software.
Caliper Corp., which makes the software, called Maptitude for Redistricting, offered licenses at reduced rates to the Law School, so each of the approximately 20 students in the class could separately access the data, Persily said.
“For states that are unable to draw their own maps, there will be legally defensible maps readily available for courts to impose on states if they want to,” Persily said. “The plans that are drawn by the students can also serve as benchmarks against the plans that eventually are passed. You can see how a plan that was not drawn by incumbents can look.”
The class was born, in part, out of a project Persily has been working on with political scientists at Harvard University to amass as much political data as possible at the precinct level from the 2008 election.
“Once you have that data and make it public, you can estimate the partisan bias of redistricting plans,” said Persily, who also holds a Ph.D. in political science from University of California-Berkeley. “This follows from that project because we hope to incorporate as much political data as possible into these plans so we know what the effects will be.”
Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School joins its traditional strengths in international and comparative law, constitutional law, administrative law, business law and human rights law with pioneering work in the areas of intellectual property, digital technology, sexuality and gender, criminal, national security, and environmental law.
The new class starting later this month will introduce students to the law and politics behind redistricting and map “legally defensible” Congressional districts that will be posted online for states to use, according to Professor 
