Appendix: Text and Precedent for Representational Adequacy Claims Under Fifty State Constitutions

This Appendix supplements the Article, From Educational Adequacy to Representational Adequacy: A New Template for Legal Attacks on Partisan Gerrymanders in the print edition of the William & Mary Law Review

Explanatory Value in Context : The Curious Case of Hotelling’s Location Model

There is a striking contrast between the significance of Harold Hotelling’s contribution to industrial economics and the fact that his location model was invalid, unrealistic and non-robust. It is difficult to make sense of the explanatory value of Hotelling’s model based on philosophical accounts that emphasize logical validity, representational adequacy, and robustness as determinants of explanatory value. However, these accounts are misleading because they overlook the context within which the explanatory value added of a model is apprehensible. We present Hotelling’s model in its historical context and show why it is an important and explanatory model despite its apparent deficiencies.Peer reviewe

Argumentative Landscapes: The Functions of Models in Social Epistemology

We argue that the appraisal of models in social epistemology requires conceiving of them as argumentative devices, taking into account the argumentative context and adopting a family-of-models perspective. We draw up such an account and show how it makes it easier to see the value and limits of the use of models in social epistemology. To illustrate our points, we document and explicate the argumentative role of epistemic landscape models in social epistemology and highlight their limitations. We also claim that our account could be fruitfully used in appraising other models in philosophy and science

Argumentative Landscapes: The Functions of Models in Social Epistemology

We argue that the appraisal of models in social epistemology requires conceiving of them as argumentative devices, taking into account the argumentative context and adopting a family-of-models perspective. We draw up such an account and show how it makes it easier to see the value and limits of the use of models in social epistemology. To illustrate our points, we document and explicate the argumentative role of epistemic landscape models in social epistemology and highlight their limitations. We also claim that our account could be fruitfully used in appraising other models in philosophy and science

From Educational Adequacy to Representational Adequacy: A New Template for Legal Attacks on Partisan Gerrymanders

For decades, legal attacks on partisan gerrymanders have foundered on a manageability dilemma: doctrinal standards the Supreme Court has regarded as judicially discoverable have been rejected as unmanageable, whereas the more manageable standards on offer have been dismissed as insufficiently tethered to the Constitution—that is, as undiscoverable. This Article contends that a solution to the dilemma may be found in a seemingly unlikely place: the body of state constitutional law concerned with the adequacy of state systems of public education. The justiciability barriers to partisan gerrymandering claims have near analogues in educational adequacy cases, yet only a minority of the state courts have deemed educational adequacy claims nonjusticiable. Other courts have dealt with putatively standardless education claims by holding that the legislature must adopt educational standards, together with a system of testing, school finance, and accountability reasonably designed to realize those standards. If the legislature drags its feet, courts have issued provisional remedies, which the legislature is free to update or replace. I explain how the same strategy could be adapted for a new generation of “representational adequacy” claims under broadly worded provisions found in many state constitutions. I also suggest that by anchoring claims to the generally worded provisions about representation found in state constitutions (or possibly Article I of the U.S. Constitution), litigants could mitigate the downside risk of success under the Equal Protection Clause—namely, the inducement of responsiveness-dampening bipartisan gerrymanders. The Online Appendix provides a state-by-state breakdown of constitutional provisions and relevant precedents, highlighting twenty-two states that appear ripe for representational adequacy litigation

An Improved Implementation and Abstract Interface for Hybrid

Hybrid is a formal theory implemented in Isabelle/HOL that provides an interface for representing and reasoning about object languages using higher-order abstract syntax (HOAS). This interface is built around an HOAS variable-binding operator that is constructed definitionally from a de Bruijn index representation. In this paper we make a variety of improvements to Hybrid, culminating in an abstract interface that on one hand makes Hybrid a more mathematically satisfactory theory, and on the other hand has important practical benefits. We start with a modification of Hybrid's type of terms that better hides its implementation in terms of de Bruijn indices, by excluding at the type level terms with dangling indices. We present an improved set of definitions, and a series of new lemmas that provide a complete characterization of Hybrid's primitives in terms of properties stated at the HOAS level. Benefits of this new package include a new proof of adequacy and improvements to reasoning about object logics. Such proofs are carried out at the higher level with no involvement of the lower level de Bruijn syntax.Comment: In Proceedings LFMTP 2011, arXiv:1110.668