Jaeckle Center People

Antoni Abat i Ninet
Bio and Publications
Visiting Professor
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Anya Bernstein
Bio and Publications
Professor
University at Buffalo School of Law

Matthew Dimick
Bio and Publications
Professor
University at Buffalo School of Law

Stuart Lazar
Bio and Publications
Professor
University at Buffalo School of Law

Tara Melish
Bio and Publications
Professor
University at Buffalo School of Law

Barbara Wejnert
Bio and Publications
Faculty Affiliate
University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences

Jeffrey M. Wice
Of Counsel, Sandler, Reiff, Young & Lamb, P.C.

Jeff Wice is one of New York’s leading redistricting experts. He served as a redistricting counsel to the State Senate and Assembly, New York City and numerous local governments across the state.

Of counsel to Washington, D.C.'s Sandler, Reiff, Young & Lamb, P.C., he has over 35 years of experience working in redistricting, voting rights and census law across the United States. Wice is a national expert on redistricting and has been included by Roll Call in its list of the top 50 Washington policy insiders.  He is a major contributor to redistricting publications of the National Conference of State Legislatures, where he also served as an officer of the organization’s Elections and Redistricting committees. Currently, he is working on a 50-state update for the National Council of State Legislatures’ redistricting website.

Wice has assisted many state legislative leaders, members of Congress, and other state and local government officials on redistricting and voting rights matters. During the 2000 decennial census process, he was counsel to President Bill Clinton's members of the 2000 Census Monitoring Board. He has taught election law at Hofstra and Touro law schools.

Gerald Benjamin
SUNY Distinguished Professor, Professor of Political Science, SUNY New Paltz

Gerald Benjamin is recognized as one of New York’s leading experts on state and local government. He serves as the SUNY Distinguished Professor and Professor of Political Science at SUNY New Paltz, where he directs the Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach  and is Associate Vice President for Regional Engagement.

Benjamin is former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and former Chair of the Department of Political Science at SUNY New Paltz. He has been research director for the New York State Commission on Constitutional Revision, a member of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s statewide commission on local government reform, and principal researcher for the New York City Charter Revision Commission.  Benjamin was elected for six terms to the Ulster County Legislature, and was selected by his peers to serve during the last as chairman, the county’s chief elected official. He headed the commission that drafted and gained voter approval for the first charter in Ulster County history, and has consulted with the City of Newburgh and County of Westchester on charter change.

Alone or with others, Benjamin has written or edited 16 books and government reports, and many scholarly articles and opinion essays. His views are frequently sought by the popular media.  Benjamin has gathered redistricting data on local jurisdictions throughout New York State and will include his data in the NYSDC database. Benjamin has expressed a strong interest in the project and will lend his considerable expertise in support.

Karin MacDonald
Director, Statewide Database

Karin Mac Donald is the director of the Statewide Database, the redistricting database for the State of California, and the Election Administration Research Center at Berkeley Law, University of California, Berkeley.  She studies, teaches and writes on redistricting, voting rights and election administration issues.  She is also the owner of Q2 Data & Research LLC, a small consulting firm specializing in redistricting, voting rights, and election administration issues.

Mac Donald has served as a consultant to many government, news, and nonprofit organizations, and worked as a redistricting consultant for various local and regional entities, including the redistricting commissions for the City of San Diego (2002) and the County of San Francisco (2002 and 2012).  Mac Donald, as project manager and senior redistricting consultant for Q2, served as the principal consultant to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission (2011).  In that capacity, along with the associates of Q2, she designed and implemented an unprecedented open and transparent redistricting for the state of California.

In 2010, Mac Donald founded The Redistricting Group at Berkeley Law, an interdisciplinary working group that designed and implemented outreach and participation strategies for the redistricting of the State of California. With funding from the James Irvine Foundation, Mac Donald set up regional redistricting assistance sites throughout California that allowed members of the public to access data and software and provided technical help to them to draw and submit district boundaries to the Citizens Redistricting Commission.  She is a member of the Election and Reapportionment Task Force of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), and serves as faculty and speaker at NCSL redistricting seminars.  She has served on a number of Census task forces involving planning for data collection, and geographic delineations of census boundaries, and was the State of California's liaison to the Census Bureau for the Block Boundary Suggestion Program and geography collection which she directed in 1998 and 2008 respectively.  She is the State's liaison to the Redistricting Data Program of the U.S. Census.