Daily Inspiration Quote by Cass Sunstein

Sunstein’s line reads like a dry doctrinal memo, but it lands as a cultural warning label: stop treating the Constitution like a customer service desk for political fairness. By insisting that the Equal Protection Clause contains “no proportional representation requirement,” he’s drawing a hard boundary around a recurring American fantasy-that courts can, and should, guarantee that political outcomes mirror demographic or partisan percentages.

The specific intent is legal triage. Equal protection, in this view, polices discrimination and arbitrariness; it doesn’t promise that legislatures will look like the population or that votes will translate into seats with mathematical symmetry. Sunstein is pushing back against a seductive syllogism: if a system produces skewed representation, it must be unconstitutional. He’s reminding readers that constitutional law often protects process and baseline equality, not optimal results.

The subtext is about judicial role and democratic appetite. Proportionality sounds like justice because it borrows the language of fairness, but it also invites courts to become election engineers. Sunstein’s sentence is a minimalist shield against that drift: if you want proportional representation, do it through politics (statutes, state constitutions, reforms), not by smuggling it into equal protection doctrine.

Context matters because the claim sits inside fights over gerrymandering, voting rights, and the translation of population into power. In an era when representation feels broken, Sunstein is saying: the diagnosis may be right, but the constitutional remedy you want isn’t sitting where you’re pointing. That’s not cynicism; it’s a bet that legitimacy requires courts to resist becoming the referee of every political disappointment.