Dear Kevin,
I agree with your analysis. The Supreme Court as a general rule
prefers to give Congress considerable freedom in its actions unless
it sees egregious violations of constitutional principles.
However, what interested me about what happened before the Court on
this occasion was the case for the "government" was prepared by
someone who is a professional mathematician with a background in
statistics with no prior, to the best of my knowledge, work on
apportionment problems. Ernst seems to have taken a look at this
situation with an open mind for the purpose of being able argue that
"expert testimony" was not providing an "open and shut" case in being
able to argue that Webster was a "better" method than Huntington-
Hill. I have not looked at the actual Court opinion in several years
but it is my memory that there was footnote which suggested that that
in light of what Ernst and the government argued it did not appear
that the case for Webster was open and shut and, thus, indeed,
Congress had the right to choose, as the opinion explained, something
that met reasonable standards of "fairness."
Regards,
Joe
On Dec 13, 2006, at 3:57 PM, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Hi,
--- MIKE OSSIPOFF <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a écrit :
I haven't succeeded in downloading Ernst's paper with its
justification
of Huntington-Hill. Is there any other way to gain find it on the
Internet?
Joe, could you briefly summarize the argument for Hill vs Webster?
Could it be that Ernst was only comparing Hill to the methods that
were
being advocated in that court case, without showing that Hill was
as good
as
Webster?
When I read this paper I got the impression that Massachusetts (who
sued advocating Webster) failed to convince the district court that
Hill
was biased, and failed to argue why what Webster optimizes is more
fair or more in line with the Constitution than what Hill optimizes.
(It seems that the real life evidence Massachusetts used to argue that
Hill is biased could be undermined by making different assumptions.)
I don't get the impression from this paper that Ernst, the Supreme
Court,
or the district court in the Massachusetts case considered "equal
proportions" to be "better" than "major fractions" (or vice versa).
The
courts only seem to hold that "EP" is acceptable according to the
wording
of the Constitution, and that Congress is within its rights to
adopt it.
Kevin Venzke
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Joseph Malkevitch
Department of Mathematics
York College (CUNY)
Jamaica, New York 11451
Phone: 718-262-2551 (Voicemail available)
My new email is:
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web page:
http://www.york.cuny.edu/~malk
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