In February 1993, the John M. Olin Foundation funded a fellowship at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for McCaughey to write a book on race and the legal system to be titled "Beyond Pluralism: Overcoming the Narcissism of Minor Differences". McCaughey wrote op-eds over the next six months in "The Wall Street Journal" and "USA Today" in which she supported the 1993 selection of a jury from predominately-white, Republican, rural counties for the urban (Memphis)-located retrial of African American and Democratic US Representative Harold Ford, Sr., and praised the 1993 "Shaw v. Reno" Supreme Court decision, favoring five white voters who said their rights had been infringed upon by redistricting that had been done to comply with the Voting Rights Act.