Racial Fairness in Legislative Redistricting

In this chapter, we study standards of racial fairness in legislative redistricting- a field that has been the subject of considerable legislation, jurisprudence, and advocacy, but very little serious academic scholarship. We attempt to elucidate how basic concepts about “color-blind” societies, and similar normative preferences, can generate specific practical standards for racial fairness in representation and redistricting. We also provide the normative and theoretical foundations on which concepts such as proportional representation rest, in order to give existing preferences of many in the literature a firmer analytical foundation.