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Voice, Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failings of Liberal Representation. By Melissa S. Williams. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. xiii, 329p. $35.00.
Melissa Williams's thesis is that the fair representation of certain groups may require the presence of members of these groups in legislative bodies. "Self-representation" is justified specifically for "historically marginalized groups"-those who have been "the subjects of legal exclusion from citizenship and of state-sponsored discrimination" (p. 17) and whose interests, therefore, may not otherwise be fairly represented today. Williams takes African Americans and women as paradigms.
Her study is timely. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 initiated a revolution in the theory and practice of representation in the United States. The revolution was carried forward by important amendments enacted in 1982, whose practical effect was to establish that under certain circumstances African Americans (and possibly others) have a right to some degree-although, as the statute insists, not necessarily a proportional degree-of self-representation in federal and state legislatures.
We are now well into a counterrevolution, led by a Supreme Court majority which is skeptical that measures aimed at ensuring self-representation are consistent with political equality. Indeed, in light of the Court's most recent rulings in voting rights cases, it is not obvious that any such measures would survive direct constitutional review. Although she would regret such an outcome, Williams argues that it should not be surprising: Even interpreted expansively, the dominant theory of representation in American constitutional jurisprudence "does not contain the theoretical resources for a complete or fully coherent account of the fair representation of historically marginalized groups" (p. 105).
Williams labels this dominant theory "liberal representation." As she understands it, the theory combines a requirement of procedural equality ("one person,...