This essay proposes a novel compactness standard "for courts to identify at least the worst cases of gerrymandering and to provide a remedy." This standard is based on the perception of gerrymandering as aggressive voter exchange, an exchange that distorts the shapes of election districts and renders them non-compact by expelling voters living close by and exchanging them for voters living further away. Aggressive voter exchange involves discrimination against large numbers of voters --possibly a majority of voters in some districts -- only because of their voting preferences or their minority status. This form of discrimination, we argue, is prohibited by the First and the Fourteenth Amendments. The proposed standard requires that a majority share of the area of any election district be contained in the Equal-Land-Area Circle, a circle about the center of the district that has the same land area in the state as that of the district. Seven percent of district shapes in 1996 and ten percent in 2004 did not conform to this standard.
This paper advances a radical and controversial analysis of the legal status of children. I argue that the denial of equal rights and equal protection to children under the law is inconsistent with liberal and progressive beliefs about social justice and fairness. I first situate children's legal and social status in its historical context, examining popular assumptions about children and their rights, and expose the false necessity of children's current legal status. I then offer a philosophical analysis for why children's present subordination is unjust, and an explanation of how society could be sensibly and stably arranged otherwise. My first conclusion from this analysis is that age-based classifications should not be presumed to be rational. From this point, the paper suggests an argument for treating children as a suspect class for the purposes of equal protection analysis. The paper further advances the claim that many of the ways children are legally discriminated against implicate their fundamental rights, and that many age-based classifications should therefore be subject to strict scrutiny and found unconstitutional. I then go on to analyze specific legal issues such as voting rights, corporal punishment, runaway children, and due process in juvenile justice using these considerations.
