Law and power are seldom strangers, but their relationship is peculiarly close in the reform of representation now being forced on the legislatures of our states. This chapter discusses that the real divergence between the Court and its critic is over an appropriate political theory—a body of descriptive or predictive generalizations about representation and political power which can connect normative premise and prescriptive conclusions in this debate. Political theorists have by no means been blind to the empirical relationship of representation to power since the time of Edmund Burke, but their work is usually phrased in other language. The chapter offers a main example analyses of the role of political parties. Professor Black is faithful to an important element of American experience in speaking of the "defensive nature of representation"; John C. Calhoun may indeed be our most authentically American political theorist.