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Gerrymandering is a scourge that is abused by both political parties, but has one victim: Our Democracy. WMH was proud to see two of our lawyers honored for their work to restore fairness to the process so that it’s the voters who pick the politicians that represent them and not the other way around.

“It was a privilege to represent committed public servants Paul Nichols and Gary Greenberg in a challenge to New York’s Assembly redistricting, which the state legislature gerrymandered to protect incumbents.  We’ve seen gerrymandering around the country at endemic levels being used to disenfranchise minorities and give one political party unfair advantages over another.  It can also be used to protect incumbents on both sides of the aisle, paralyzing democracy, as the New York legislature tried to do this most recent round of redistricting by bypassing the state’s new constitutional redistricting process.

The courts thankfully saw through this effort and declared the Assembly map unconstitutional and void.  In the lawsuit, we also worked with Professor Jeanne Clelland of the University of Colorado Boulder.  She developed an innovative method for statistically assessing the probability that a voting map is drawn to favor incumbents.  This statistical method has now been deployed beyond our case to other challenges to incumbent gerrymandering.

We believe that this case helped expose and reverse the backsliding of democracy in New York, which, if unchecked, would have translated into a generation of unconstitutional elections.”

– Jim Walden and Peter Devlin