Heather Gerken Heather Gerken is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law, Yale Law School and an expert in election law and constitutional law. She has published numerous articles on those topics in the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, Roll Call, Legal Affairs, Legal Times, The New Republic, The American Prospect, and elsewhere. She has served as a commentator on election controversies for a number of media outlets, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, the Lehrer News Hour, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC News. In 2008 she served as a senior adviser to the National Election Protection Team for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Professor Gerken's research centers on questions of applied democratic theory, including the role groups play in a democratic system, the translation of institutional design choices into manageable legal doctrine, and the values associated with minority-dominated institutions. Her most recent scholarship explores questions of election reform, diversity, and dissent. Professor Gerken’s proposal that Congress establish a “Democracy Index” – a national ranking system of state and local election performance – has been incorporated into separate bills by Senator Hillary Clinton and then-Senator Barack Obama and has been the subject of a conference sponsored by the Pew Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and AEI-Brookings. The proposal is the subject of her forthcoming book, The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System is Failing and How to Fix It.

New Agenda for America: Will History Repeat Itself?

To mark the 80th Anniversary of the Great Crash of ‘29, we asked 15 progressive thinkers to write about lessons learned and what lies ahead. Together, their reflections constitute a New Agenda for America — a message of how the ideals of a fair society should apply to the economic and social policies of our time.

Rahm Emanuel summed up the most important lesson of the Crash of 1929: “never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

The reason is simple. Policy depends on politics, and our democracy is not well suited to getting a lot done quickly. A year ago, many thought…

Beyond elephants and donkeys

How can we prevent our political system from giving us more of the same?  Heather Gerken recommends methods for holding politicians accountable.

Let’s start by being realistic: Even a wildly popular president elected by engaged and passionate supporters will have trouble getting his program passed when the workaday project of governance begins.  Passing New Deal 2.0 is likely to require what Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter called a “civically militant electorate,” and such electorates are a rarity in American politics once the drama of an election subsides.

One strategy for creating Democracy 2.0 is to figure out how to maintain a civically…

Will “Yes We Can” Become “Well, We Tried”?

Winning campaigns and running a country are two different things — and Obama is in danger of losing momentum on the latter. Heather Gerken describes how those of us still mobilized can help keep the country on track.

While it is quite exciting to think about the transformative policies a New Deal 2.0 might bring, it is worth noting that at some point the Obama Administration is going to have to get these policies passed. And coming up with a great idea is often easier than making it a reality. Especially in Washington, where killing legislation is an ugly blood sport,…