Apportioning the United States House of Representatives

Apportionment is the constitutional problem of allocating the seats of the United States House of Representatives proportionally to states' populations. History and common sense together suggest a fundamental set of principles of fairness that should be met by any method used to solve it. The principles determine a unique method originally proposed by Daniel Webster in 1832 that was discarded in 1941 on fallacious grounds in favor of the present one.