Cardozo Law Review
Abstract
The 2010 Census, like its predecessors, represented a momentous logistical and technological undertaking with far reaching consequences for political representation and allocation of public resources. It also promised to spawn a series of legal controversies over how to count people, what information the government should gather, which individuals truly "count" for purposes of the census, and where they should be counted. This Article explores these present and past controversies surrounding the census. The issues of "sampling" and "statistical adjustment" pervaded much of the legal commentary and caselaw concerning the census for the past twenty years. The undercount will continue to be a common theme, although given newfound ideological opposition to filling out the census form, it is unclear at this stage who is less likely to be counted. The 2010 Census raises new issues of relevance to redistricting claims under the Voting Rights Act, concerning the counting and distribution of data on both the noncitizen and prisoner population. At the same time, recent developments in voting rights law, which place a premium on the size of a minority community, have raised the legal stakes for this census. Despite the technical nature of many census-related controversies, one's position on how, what, whom, and where to count cannot be separated from the larger questions of how easy or difficult it should be for plaintiffs to bring and win civil rights claims, particularly with respect to the redistricting process.
Disciplines
Law | Law and Society
Recommended Citation
Nathaniel Persily,
The Law of the Census: How to Count, What to Count, Whom to Count, and Where to Count Them,
32
Cardozo L. Rev.
755
(2011).
Available at:
https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol32/iss3/3