Benjamin Plener Cover

Benjamin Plener Cover studied engineering, mathematics, and economics at the University of Toronto; international development at the London School of Economics; and law at Yale. During law school, he was a submissions editor for the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, a student director of the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project, and a participant in the Prisoner Legal Services Clinic. He also founded a nonprofit organization called 24 Hours for Darfur.

Upon graduation, he worked on pretrial reform efforts at the public defender’s office in New Orleans as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow and Vital Projects Fund grant recipient. He then handled misdemeanor and felony cases in municipal and state court. In 2013, he became the legislative director for New Orleans City Councilmember LaToya Cantrell, focusing on policy issues including neighborhood revitalization, land use, economic development, immigration, health, education, criminal justice reform, and political reform.

He has served as a Visiting Associate Professor since 2014 and a tenure-track Associate Professor since 2017. He has written about the Petition Clause and partisan gerrymandering, and his work has appeared in the Stanford Law Review and the U.C. Davis Law Review. He has served as a peer reviewer for Election Law Journal and currently serves on the executive committee of the Election Law section of the American Association of Law Schools. His article on partisan gerrymandering was recently cited by a federal three-judge panel in the case of Ohio A. Philip Randolph Inst. v. Householder, No. 1:18-CV-357, 2019 WL 1969585 (S.D. Ohio May 3, 2019).

• Election Law
• Electoral Districting
• First Amendment

• Burton Ellis Research Scholar, 2019
• Vital Projects Fund Grant Recipient, 2011-2012 
• Arthur P. Liman Public Interest Fellow, 2009-2011

• Quantifying Political Gerrymandering: An Evaluation of the Efficiency Gap Proposal, 70 Stan. L. Rev. 1131(2018) (cited in Ohio A. Philip Randolph Inst. v. Householder, No. 1:18-CV-357, 2019 WL 1969585, at *69, n.733 (S.D. Ohio May 3, 2019))
• The First Amendment Right to a Remedy, 50 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1741 (2017)