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while failing to hear the melody being played. In his fixation on the most technical aspects of the Giles litigation, Professor Heckman has missed the political, cultural, historical, and legal significance of Giles as a defining moment Giles was not, of course, the first case in which courts of this era concluded that equity would not enforce"political rights. Professor Heckman seems to think that Giles could be of substantive significance only if it had newly conceived this doctrine. That is akin to arguing that Plessy v. ferguson was not all that noteworthy because the Court, having already held that interracial adultery could be punished more severely than same-race adultery, had already established that the Fourteenth Amendment did not require colorblindness. Giles was significant because it was prepared to hold political rights non- remediable in equity even in a context that was the most radical threat to the constitutional order that the court had faced under the fifteenth amendment. And giles was momentous because the decisive actors of the time understood it in these terms as a fundamental constitutional test of whether massive disfranchisement would be permitted under the shadow of the Fifteenth Amendment. Most dramatically, the language in which the Court, through Justice Holmes, justified applying the doctrine, even in such an extreme context, baldly proclaimed that the Court would not entertain head-on challenges to disfranchisement in any form of action-equitable, legal, or any other 3163US.537(896) 6See Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583(1883) 'The Court formally left open the possibility of a damages action, but no court ever acted on that option #- ?1& $#,%- 1!+."#-?1&, #,, * . ".* * + @ 0 . D 6 " "! "* *" " " D " 0 " *" 0 * * /* 0 * 9 :! " * . *. + 0 + * #& 0 0 .* * "+ * * . * + < * " . ) * /* . " 0 .* 0 < . /* + 6 0 * * * ) " 0 *.* + * "* * 0 + 0 * . * 0 ) 3 " * 0 * " *B* "5* "+ * 6 6 ". * 0 * < 7/* .""