Noah Feldman, Columnist

Gerrymandering Is a Cancer State Courts Can't Cure

A North Carolina court’s ruling is a fluke, not a trend.

September 5, 2019 at 3:10 PM UTC

Corrected

September 9, 2019 at 6:13 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Not happy with the shape of things.
Photographer: The Washington Post/The Washington Post

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It’s great news that a North Carolina state court has struck down partisan gerrymandering under its state constitution. The ability of states to read their own constitutions differently from the federal constitution is part of what make states laboratories for democracy. And no experiment is more dangerous for the future of democracy than highly effective, computer-modeled partisan gerrymandering.

But don’t get too excited about the prospect that lots of states will overcome partisan gerrymandering through state judicial action.