About Louisiana

Louisiana is unlike any other state in America. Its legal system is based on French and Spanish civil law rather than English common law. Its territory is divided into parishes, not counties. Its largest city, New Orleans, was built below sea level on a swamp at the mouth of the continent's greatest river. And its culture, a centuries-old fusion of French, Spanish, African, Native American, and Caribbean influences, produced jazz music, Creole cuisine, Mardi Gras, and an architectural heritage found nowhere else in the United States.

The state's geography is equally distinctive. Louisiana sits where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, creating one of the most productive coastal ecosystems in the world, and one of the most vulnerable. The state is losing its coastline to the Gulf at a rate that makes it a front line of the global climate crisis. Entire communities have been swallowed by the sea. The land itself is sinking even as the water rises.

Politically, Louisiana has shifted from a Democratic stronghold, defined by the populist legacy of Huey Long , to one of the most reliably Republican states in the nation. But its politics have always been colorful, personal, and unpredictable, shaped by the same cultural complexity that defines everything else here.