and also the student and faculty organizers of what turned out to be a genuinely terrific conference at William & Mary, which led to this Volume, and the participants in the roundtable discussion on "Redistricting After Evenwel: The Prospects for One Person, One Vote" at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, where I presented an early draft. Thanks are due, as well, to some particularly excellent research assistants:
New work in economics has shown how extreme inequality of wealth makes opportunities more unequal by hardening class lines, restricting access to networks, and giving elites both the means and the incentive to maintain and magnify their own advantages and keep others out. Moreover, we know more clearly than ever how economic and political inequality (and inequality of opportunity) are intertwined. But we have somehow lost the sense that these threats to our democracy of opportunity are threats, as well, to our constitutional order. We tell the story of the democracy of opportunity tradition, exploring how both its proponents and its opponents viewed these constitutional stakes at a series of critical moments of constitutional conflict. We begin our story at the beginning, and then recount how the democracy of opportunity tradition evolved as both our economic life and our constitutional order evolved. We then tell a story of how the democracy of opportunity tradition was forgotten, and how that forgetting colored the revival of the constitutional principle of inclusion in the Civil Rights Revolution. We end by addressing why the democracy of opportunity tradition matters today, and what might be at stake in recovering it.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.