Gerrymandering is drawing district lines to advantage a party or group. It is measured with metrics such as the efficiency gap, partisan bias, mean-median difference and declination.
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Voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no one wins a majority of first choices, the last-place candidate is eliminated and those ballots move to their next choice, repeating until someone has a majority.
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The framers chose it late in the 1787 Convention as a compromise, mostly because legislative selection and a direct popular vote each seemed worse.
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Habeas corpus is a legal procedure that lets a detained person make a court test whether the government has lawful grounds to hold them. It is often called the Great Writ.
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Magna Carta became a symbol of liberty through repeated reissue and public reading in the 13th century, then through Coke's 17th-century reinterpretation and later political use.
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Botanically a tomato is a fruit; in cooking and under US customs law it is a vegetable. The Supreme Court ruled in 1893 because a tariff taxed vegetables but not fruit.
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The veto emerged from wartime talks among the Allied powers at Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta and San Francisco, and no single country invented it. Its scope was settled at Yalta in 1945.
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The EU grew from a 1951 coal and steel pact among six countries into a union formally created by the Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992 and in force in 1993.
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The 1648 Peace ended the Thirty Years' War. Many scholars now reject the idea that it founded the sovereign state system, though some defend a qualified importance.
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The left-right spectrum comes from seating in France's revolutionary assembly in 1789, where supporters of change sat left of the president and defenders of the king sat right.
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Natural rights grew out of ancient natural law. Historians disagree on when the shift happened: the twelfth-century canonists, the fourteenth century, or the seventeenth.
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Olson argued that in stable societies, special-interest groups accumulate over time and divert effort from growth to redistribution, slowing economies until upheaval clears them away.
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The Court has nearly complete discretion. Losing parties file cert petitions, clerks screen them, and at least four of nine justices must vote to hear a case.
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Corporations and sovereign debt rely on legal fictions, such as treating an entity as a separate person, which let strangers cooperate when a state or other actors uphold them.
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