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Nicholas Stephanopoulos
| Nicholas Stephanopoulos | |
 | |
| Basic facts | |
| Organization: | Harvard Law School |
| Role: | Professor |
| Location: | Cambridge, Ma. |
| Education: | •Harvard University (A.B.) •Cambridge University (MPhil.) •Yale Law School (J.D.) |
| Website: | Official website |
Nicholas Stephanopoulos is a lawyer and legal scholar who focuses on election law and constitutional law. As of 2020, he was a professor of law at Harvard Law School. Prior to that, he was a professor of law and Marjorie Fried Research Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School.[1]
In 2015, Stephanopoulos and policy analyst Eric McGhee defined the efficiency gap as a concept and proposed that the metric be applied to determine whether illegal partisan gerrymandering has occurred in a jurisdiction. The efficiency gap metric was applied in a court decision striking down the district map for the Wisconsin State Assembly. This decision was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which agreed on June 19, 2017, to hear the case. If the high court upholds the earlier ruling, it will mark the first time that the Supreme Court has accepted a standard for measuring illegal partisan gerrymandering.[2]
Career
Early career
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2006, Stephanopoulos began working as an associate at Jenner and Block in Washington, D.C. At that firm, he focused on election law and drafted briefs for U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning the Voting Rights Act and campaign finance, according to his page on the University of Chicago Law School's website.[3]
Academic career
From 2010 to 2012, Stephanopoulos taught legal practice and participated in a redistricting project called DrawCongress.org at the Columbia Law School. In 2012, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he researched election law and constitutional law and served as an assistant law professor.[3] In addition to writing academic papers on election law, Stephanopoulos also published shorter pieces for popular publications, such as The Huffington Post.[4]
From 2017 to 2019, Stephanopoulos began serving as a professor of law and was also a Herbert and Marjorie Fried Research Scholar at the University of Chicago.[5]
Stephanopoulos also filed briefs and works as an attorney in cases concerning redistricting. In 2015, he wrote an amicus curiae brief in the case Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, which challenged the 2012 Arizona redistricting plan, alleging that new districts were drawn based on Democratic partisanship.[6] He also served as the attorney in a Wisconsin lawsuit alleging that the state's legislative districts were redrawn based on Republican partisanship.[7]
Efficiency gap
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redistricting procedures |
|---|
2020 |
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- See also: Efficiency gap
In a 2015 article for the University of Chicago Law Review, Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee defined the efficiency gap as a concept and proposed that the metric be applied to determine whether illegal partisan gerrymandering has occurred in a jurisdiction. In their article on the subject, Stephanopoulos and McGhee described the goal of partisan gerrymandering as follows:[2]
| “ | The goal of partisan gerrymandering is to win as many seats as possible given a certain number of votes. To accomplish this aim, a party must ensure that its votes translate into seats more 'efficiently' than do those of its opponent. In the plurality-rule, single-member district elections that are almost universal in American politics, 'inefficient' votes are those that do not directly contribute to victory. Thus, any vote for a losing candidate is wasted by definition, but so too is any vote beyond the 50 percent threshold needed (in a two-candidate race) to win a seat. If these supporters could be moved through redistricting to a different seat, they could help the party claim that seat as well without changing the outcome in the seat from which they were moved.[8] | ” |
| —Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos and Eric M. McGhee | ||
Granting that some inefficient votes (as defined above) exist in any single-member district electoral system, Stephanopoulos and McGhee posited that the goal of a party conducting a partisan gerrymander is to "end up with fewer wasted votes than the opposition by winning its seats by smaller margins on average." Working from these premises, Stephanopoulos and McGhee defined the efficiency gap as "the difference between the parties' respective wasted votes, divided by the total number of votes cast in the election."[2]
Stephanopoulos and McGhee proposed that the efficiency gap be expressed as a number of seats when evaluating congressional maps and as a ratio when used for evaluating state legislative maps. They reasoned that "what matters in congressional plans is their impact on the total number of seats held by each party at the national level." By contrast, Stephanopoulos and McGhee wrote, "state houses are self-contained bodies of varying sizes, for which seat shares reveal the scale of parties' advantages and enable temporal and spatial comparability." Stephanopoulos and McGhee proposed efficiency gaps of two seats (in the case of congressional delegations) and 8 percent (in the case of state legislative chambers) be used as mininimum thresholds for determining whether an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander has taken place.[2]
See also
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ University of Chicago Law School, "Nicholas Stephanopoulos," accessed July 13, 2017
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 The University of Chicago Law Review, "Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap," Spring 2015
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 University of Chicago Law School, "Nicholas Stephanopoulos c.v.," accessed July 13, 2017
- ↑ The Huffington Post, "Nicholas Stephanopoulos," accessed July 13, 2017
- ↑ Kelly Caldwell, "Email exchange with Spencer Graves," December 2020
- ↑ University of Chicago Law School, "Nicholas Stephnopoulos Additional Activities," accessed July 13, 2017
- ↑ The New York Times, "Key Question for Supreme Court: Will It Let Gerrymanders Stand?" April 21, 2017
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
