Daniel D. Polsby

Ugly: An Inquiry into the Problem of Racial Gerrymandering Under the Voting Rights Act

A fundamental problem of our representative democracy is this: how far may a legislature go in controlling who is elected to it? The compactness of districts is pertinent to this inquiry. We argue that compactness in some sense is ordinarily a property of single-member territorial districts. We offer proof that gerrymandering - whether it is conducted under the auspices of the Voting Rights Act or its freelance legislative tinkering - can spoil the game for representation by single-member districts. In order to avoid that destiny, an antigerrymandering principle must be defined and administered outside normal political channels.

A Positive Theory of the Attorney-Client Privilege and the Work Product Doctrine

This article proposes a positive theory that explains the confidentiality rules. Our argument is that the attorney-client privilege and the work product doctrine offer two perspectives of a larger goal of increasing the amount of information about disputes that is available to courts and to work against the disincentives to the production of that information which would otherwise exist.

Long-Term Nonrelationship of Widespread and Increasing Firearm Availability to Homicide in the United States

This article seeks to examine the common view that widespread availability of firearms is a major cause, or even the principal cause, of high American rates of homicide. Reasonably accurate data as to both homicide rates and the acquisition and ownership of firearms in the United States are available back to the mid-1940s. These data do not show a correlation over the long term between the distribution of firearms in the population at large and homicide rates. The two variables do cross occasionally, but they do not do so consistently. Rather, the trend in the period 1973-1997 was one of very large increases in firearms accompanied by essentially flat, even diminishing, homicide rates. That is the general rule for the period since the end of World War II to date.

Comparable Worth in the Equal Pay Act

What is actually entailed in implementing the principle of “equal pay for equal work”? Far from being an uncontroversial proposition with none of the problems attendant on the theory of comparable worth, we show that this slogan, in practical implementation, raises many of the same issues. We use hypothetical fact situations to clarify the particular issues that may arise in an Equal Pay Act case. Our discussion focuses attention on the fact that the many ways in which “comparable worth” has engendered criticism are already and inevitably involved in the practical administration of the Equal Pay Act.

F.C.C. v. National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting and the Judicious Uses of Administrative Discretion

To judge from the Supreme Court opinion, F.C.C. v. National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting (NCCB) , was an ordinary case of judicial review of an administrative agency rule. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had decided after a long proceeding that diversity of ownership in the various media of mass communications was important enough to rule that owners of daily newspapers should not, in the future, be licensed to operate

Unions, Fairness, and the Conundrums of Collective Choice

This article posits that attempts thus far to develop a consistent, principles theory of the duty of fair representation have not been successful. We do not deny that certain particularized rules of fairness derived from various sources can be generated and applied to particular cases. We do not think, however, that there is an intelligible general rule of distributive or procedural fairness that may be interposed by a court to overrule the discretionary decisions made by a union in bargaining for its constituents. This article examines the substantive theories of fairness that have been suggested by courts and commentators.