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THE ROLE OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT, voting rights questions, and the most important legal issues related to race and redistricting seemed largely settled in the light of Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). All that changed dramatically in the mid-1990s. Whether we assign the principal reason for this change as outrage at the shape of some of the 1990s' districts that were carefully crafted to make the election of minority candidates near certain, or racist backlash to the dramatic minority gains in descriptive representation that occurred in 1992 and earlier, or simply the inevitable spillover into the voting rights arena of the ongoing discontent of the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court with earlier Courts' uses of the Civil War Amendments as a justification for various kinds of affirmative action, there can be no doubt that the previously arcane issue of districting became part of both the legal and political agenda in a way that it had not been since the years immediately following Baker v. Carr. The aim of this volume is to contribute to both the public and scholarly debate about voting rights and race and redistricting by focusing on the "on the ground" realities rather than on discussion of constitutional jurisprudence in the abstract.