Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), argued 19–20 Apr. 1961, set for reargument 1 May 1961, reargued 9 Oct. 1961, decided 26 Mar. 1962 by vote of 6 to 2; Brennan for the Court, Stewart and Clark concurring, Frankfurter and Harlan in dissent, Whittaker not participating. After serving for fifteen years on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren, himself the author of the Court's opinion in the celebrated school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), called Baker v. Carr “the most vital decision” during his service on the Court, and the apportionment revolution it inaugurated as the most important achievement of his Court. Baker v. Carr did not establish the “one‐person, one vote principle”—that was first announced in Gray v. Sanders (1963) and was confirmed with respect to congressional and legislative districts in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964). But Baker v. Carr opened the federal courts to urban interests that had been unable to force state legislators to reapportion state legislatures or to redistrict congressional seats to reflect the urbanization of the United States, or to secure any redress of their grievances either from Congress or their respective state courts.

Warren might have exaggerated the importance of the case, but it clearly inaugurated a decade of lawsuits, at the end of which the political map of the nation had been redrawn. Some have termed this a revolution in redistributing political power, although there is continuing controversy as to whether the realignment of legislative districts that clearly did transfer legislative votes from the rural to the urban and suburban populations has had significant policy consequences.

Baker v. Carr was initiated in Tennessee in 1959 when a number of plaintiffs from Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville brought an action before the federal district court in Nashville against Joseph Cordell Carr, the Tennessee secretary of state, and George McCanless, the attorney general. The Tennessee Constitution required the General Assembly to apportion the members of the General Assembly among the state's ninety‐five counties after each decennial census. But the last time it had done so was in 1901, and even then it had failed to give city voters a fair share of seats. The Tennessee courts had been equally unsympathetic and declined to intervene.

The Baker plaintiffs, pointing out that the federal courts were the only forum that offered any promise of relief, asked for a declaratory judgment that the Tennessee apportionment act was unconstitutional and an injunction to prevent state officers from conducting any more elections under it. The three‐judge district court, following established precedent, dismissed the complaint on the grounds that the relief requested and the legal wrongs alleged were not within the scope of judicial power conferred on federal courts by Article III of the Constitution and the federal statutes implementing that article. Furthermore, said the district court, even if the Courts had jurisdiction, the questions presented to it were nonjusticiable, that is, they were “political questions” unsuited for judicial inquiry and adjustment.

On direct appeal to the Supreme Court, amicus briefs were filed by various urban‐based groups, and most importantly, by Solicitor General Archibald Cox in behalf of the recently inaugurated Kennedy administration. As Justice Tom Clark pointed out in his concurring opinion, Baker v. Carr was one of the “most carefully considered” Supreme Court decisions of modern times. The Court heard three hours of oral argument on 19 and 20 April 1961, three times more than it gives to most cases, and then held the case for another three hours of argument at the opening of the 1961 term. And as Justice Clark commented, Baker was considered “over and over again by us in Conference and individually” (p. 258).

The Court announced its decision on 26 March 1962 in five opinions taking up 163 pages. The opinions were unusually sharp toned for their day. Justice Clark, for example, characterized Justice Felix Frankfurter's 64‐page dissent as “bursting with words that go through so much and conclude with so little.”

Justice William Brennan, speaking for the Court, carefully avoided explicit discussion of the merits of the case. There was little doubt that the majority felt that Tennessee had acted unconstitutionally, but it limited its holding to questions of jurisdiction, standing, and justiciability. Justice Brennan distinguished between the two grounds relied upon by the district court—jurisdiction and nonjusticiability—pointing out that in instances of nonjusticiability, consideration of the cause is not wholly and immediately foreclosed; rather, the Court's inquiry necessarily proceeds to the point of deciding whether the duty asserted can be judicially identified and its breach judicially determined, and whether protection for the right can be judicially molded. Where jurisdiction is lacking, however, the case goes no further.

Justice Brennan quickly concluded that the subject matter was within the jurisdiction of federal courts, and that the plaintiffs had a sufficient interest in the weight of their votes to have standing. More difficult to decide was whether the question presented was justiciable. In revisiting the doctrine of political questions, first announced by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Luther v. Borden (1849), Justice Brennan asserted that political questions chiefly relate to separation of powers issues (which raise questions about relations among coequal branches of the national government) and thus call for judicial deference. In contrast, federalism questions (which raise issues about the consistency of a state's action with the federal Constitution) do not call for such judicial deference. “Prominent on the surface of any case held to involve a political question,” he wrote, “is found a textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department; or a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it; or the impossibility of deciding without an initial policy determination of a kind clearly for nonjudicial discretion; or the impossibility of a court's undertaking independent resolution without expressing lack of respect due coordinate branches of government; or an unusual need for unquestioning adherence to a political decision already made; or the potentiality of embarrassment from multifarious pronouncements by various departments on one question” (p. 217). He also distinguished between questions such as those presented by Luther v. Borden, arising under the Guarantee Clause of Article IV, where “judicially manageable standards are lacking,” and those arising under the Equal Protection Clause, where standards are “well developed and familiar” (p. 226).

Perhaps the most difficult obstacle for the majority was the one precedent of Colegrove v. Green (1946). In Colegrove the Court had refused to force the Illinois legislature to correct the inequities in the state's congressional apportionment that had given Illinois both the largest and smallest congressional districts in the United States, one nine times the size of the other. Colegrove was a 3 to 3 to 1 decision (Justice Robert Jackson had been absent as the U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, and no one had as yet been appointed to replace the recently deceased Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone). Justice Frankfurter, speaking for the Court, but with the concurrence of only two other justices, coined the phrase political thicket, which has come to be the recognized shorthand warning against federal courts intervening in political questions where they allegedly have neither commission nor competence to decide. Justice Brennan, however, dismissed Justice Frankfurter's opinion as “the minority opinion,” arguing that four of the seven sitting judges in Colegrove had found no constitutional obstacles to federal courts reviewing the constitutionality of legislative apportionments.

Although in Baker the Court limited its holding to jurisdictional matters, it did not restrict its holding to situations such as in Tennessee where the legislature had failed to comply with its own constitution. Justice Brennan made it clear that any legislature that failed to reapportion its districts in such a fashion as to reflect in some way population equality was in jeopardy of violating the Equal Protection Clause. His opinion thus called into question the constitutionality of legislative apportionment in practically every state in the Union. “We conclude,” wrote Justice Brennan, “that the complainant's allegations of denial of equal protection present a justiciable constitutional cause of action upon which appellants are entitled to a trial and a decision” (p. 237).

Justices William O. Douglas, Tom Clark, and Potter Stewart, while joining the opinion of the Court, wrote separate concurrences. To Justice Douglas the issues were uncomplicated: it was a voting rights case and voting rights have long been within the protection of federal courts. Justice Clark took issue with Justice Harlan's dissenting opinion, which contended that the Court's decision would mean that the Equal Protection Clause required “mathematical equality among voters.” (In this, Justice Clark was a poor prophet, for that is what before too long became the controlling standard.) Rather, Justice Clark concluded that all that had to be decided was that Tennessee's apportionment is a “crazy quilt without rational basis” (p. 254). Unless the federal courts provided relief, he claimed, there could be no remedy for what he believed to be a patent violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

Justice Stewart wrote to emphasize that the Court had only decided three things and no more: that federal courts possessed jurisdiction of the subject matter, that the appellants had standing to challenge the Tennessee apportionment statutes, and that reapportionment was a justiciable issue.

Justice Frankfurter, in the last opinion he would write before retiring from the Court, was obviously distressed by the short shrift given to his Colegrove opinion and by what he alleged to be the Court's “massive repudiation of the experience of our whole past in asserting destructively novel judicial power demands” (p. 251). He reiterated his Colegrove view that the federal courts should not intervene in the “essentially political conflict of forces by which the relation between population and representation has time out of mind been and now is determined” (p. 267). He predicted that the injection of the courts into this clash of political forces in political settlements could undermine their authority. As in Colegrove, Frankfurter told those aggrieved by the Tennessee legislature that the remedy “must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives” (p. 270). The Court, he contended, was being asked to “choose among competing bases of representation—ultimately, really, among competing theories of political philosophy” (p. 300) and that was not an appropriate issue for judges. He pointed out that representation according to population is not, in our history or Constitution, enshrined as the only standard or the standard by reference to which the reasonableness of apportionment plans may be judged.

Justice John M. Harlan, in his dissenting opinion, went to the merits. He contended that even if federal courts had jurisdiction—which he did not think to be the case—there is no federal constitutional requirement that state legislatures must be structured so as to reflect equally the voice of every voter. There is nothing in the federal Constitution, said Justice Harlan, to prevent Tennessee, if it so wishes, from giving rural voters more electoral weight than urban ones. Moreover, he warned that “the majority has wholly failed to reckon with what the future may hold in store” when federal courts try to determine what is and what is not a constitutional apportioning policy (p. 339).

In an extended appendix, Justice Harlan set out to prove the inadequacy of arithmetical formulas as measures of the “irrational rationality” of Tennessee's apportionment. The disparity in electoral strength among the various counties in Tennessee, he argued, may be accounted for by various economic, political, and geographic considerations. It is a constitutionally permissible decision to preserve the electoral strength of the rural interests, notwithstanding shifts in population.

It did not take long for other states to go through the door opened by Baker v. Carr. In one year, thirty‐six states had become involved in reapportionment lawsuits. During the next several years the Court rounded out the reapportionment revolution. Justices Harlan and Frankfurter proved to be inaccurate prophets about the difficulties that the courts would have in finding appropriate judicial standards. The judges quickly retreated from the “rationality test”—that apportionment plans were to be evaluated in terms of whether or not they had any rational basis—to what many think to be a simplistic but nonetheless more manageable standard of mathematical strict equality—one person, one vote. Within a short time the Court had concluded that no factors—not geographical districts, nor a desire to keep governmental units intact, nor a federal, compromise in which one chamber would represent population and the other governmental units such as counties—but strictly equal population districts would pass constitutional muster. The Court, in a series of cases, moved from a requirement of “substantial equality among districts” to “precise mathematical equality” to a distinction between congressional districts where strict equality is required, and state legislative districts where some tolerance is allowed to permit consideration of other appropriate factors.

See also Fair Representation; Justiciability; Political Questions; Reapportionment Cases.

Bibliography

Jack W. Peltason , Federal Courts in the Political Process (1955).
Jack W. Peltason , Fifty‐Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation (1971).
Jack W. Peltason , Understanding the Constitution, 12th ed. (1991).

J.W. Peltason

BAKER V. CARR

Representative Government

The concept of representation is basic to local, state, and federal government. Such bodies as local councils, state legislatures, and the U.S. House of Representatives are formed by elected officials who come from a particular area or district to represent the interests of the people who elected them. If one representative comes from a district with ten people and another comes from a district with a thousand people, the people in the smaller district can be said to have a greater voice in government than the people in the larger district. Representation is thus unequal and government may be unfair

Unequal Representation

By the end of World War II district imbalance was especially great in the states that had the fastest growing populations. In Georgia the largest congressional district had 823,680 people in it, while the smallest had only 272,154. Illinois was another seriously malapportioned state. Its largest district, in the Chicago area, had over 914,000 people, while the smallest comprised only about 112,000. In the state legislature of Florida a majority of the members of both houses represented districts containing less than 15 percent of the state's population.

Districts Frozen in Time

These disparities occurred because, at the turn of the century, many state governments had frozen their legislative district boundaries. As the population flowed toward cities, there was no change in the districts from which representatives were elected. The reason was simple. The legislatures were dominated by members from rural districts, and it was not in their interest, nor in the interest of their constituents, to change the system. The best way for them to retain power was to keep things as they were. As the inequities worsened the legislatures had less and less incentive to reap-portion.

Unfulfilled Promise

The only hope for reform was the courts. However, the initial attempts at judicially imposed reapportionment failed. In 1946 the U.S. Supreme Court had heard the case of Colegrove v. Green, challenging apportionment in Illinois. The Court held that the issue was a "political question." While the courts have great potential power to interfere with the legislative and executive branches of government, they are held in check by certain self-imposed limitations. Political decisions are different from legal decisions which have political effects, which courts hear all the time. The line dividing these areas can never be clearly drawn. The essence of the distinction is that courts should not make decisions on subjects that are the responsibility of another branch of government. The courts can only interfere when another branch has exceeded its constitutional powers or has breached some provision of law. For example, judges cannot appoint a cabinet officer or (except as part of an extraordinary remedy) levy a tax, but they can rule on whether a particular appointment or tax is legal.

Continuing Pressure

The reapportionment problem would not go away. With no possibility of legislative change, suits continued to be brought. Finally in 1962 the dam broke. The case that became the vehicle for this revolution was Baker v. Carr. The litigation arose in Tennessee, where the state constitution required that legislative reapportionment occur every ten years. But this responsibility had been ignored since 1901. An attempt had been made several years before to challenge the existing apportionment scheme in the state courts. The plaintiffs had relied upon the Tennessee Constitution, but the Supreme Court of Tennessee had refused to adjudicate the matter, citing the Colegrove precedent. Several other states had faced such challenges, but the Colegrove doctrine had been used repeatedly to prevent the courts from entering the fray.

A JURY OF PEERS

In ancient days the jury for a trial was picked from people in the locale where the dispute had occurred. It was felt that people who knew the parties in the lawsuit and had witnessed or heard of the events at issue were best placed to decide the case. In the modern world a different approach is followed. It is felt that members of the ideal jury should have no preformed opinion about the case, and their knowledge should be based on the evidence presented by both sides at the trial. Given this standard, attorneys try to weed out prospective jurors who have prior knowledge or prejudices. In an effort to help attorneys in juror selection, a study was conducted in the early 1960s to determine likely objects and categories of prejudice. The study indicated that while discrimination against blacks was a topic much in the news there was little evidence of its affecting jurors. It showed that black Americans tended to be biased in favor of the young and poor. It indicated that people with low incomes are often biased against those with high incomes and vice versa but that people earning between seventy-five hundred dollars and fifteen thousand dollars were unlikely to meet bias from other groups. It found that women faced less likelihood of getting a fair trial from jurors who were men earning under five thousand dollars or who were women. The study also found that people under age thirty were less prejudiced in most categories, while retired people were the most. One unusual finding was that by occupation, salesmen had the most prejudices, being biased against low-income people, people of southern and eastern European origin, and the unemployed, but favoring women. While this study provided no hard and fast rules for attorneys picking a jury, it did give some guidance. Since the 1960s the study of jurors and their predilections and preferences has formed a growing field, though, then as now, an attorney's experience and instincts are still his best guides.

Source:

Time (9 August 1963): 38

Tennessee's Problem

Colegrove had been a narrow decision by a shorthanded court. The facts in the Tennessee case presented a compelling challenge to precedent. The state legislature had been intransigent in the face of its own constitution, and the inequalities were strong. The effects of malapportionment went beyond philosophical or theoretical arguments; they were felt in the reality of state finances. Rural sections of Tennessee commanded a majority of legislative seats and, as a consequence, took the majority of state funding, even though most of the tax dollars in the state were generated in the heavily populated urban areas. As a result, by the mid 1950s nearly ninety-eight dollars was spent per pupil in rural schools, but the schools in the state's four largest urban centers received less than sixty-four dollars per student. The effects were felt in many other aspects of state, county, and city finance.

Baker v. Carr.

Baker v. Carr attacked the Tennessee apportionment scheme as a violation of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That clause requires that the states treat like people the same way, and the plaintiffs argued that malapportionment violated this guarantee. There was much evidence of a violation, but before the courts could rule on the merits, they had to determine if they had jurisdiction. The case was initially heard by a three-judge panel which held that the courts had no jurisdiction. The plaintiffs then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. At that level the plaintiffs were joined by the U.S. government itself, represented by the solicitor general.

A Second Bite at the Apple

The Supreme Court eventually heard oral arguments twice. This unusual step indicated the divisions within the Court. Felix Frankfurter, who had authored the opinion in Colegrove, was still a justice and was active in support of its holding. In March 1962, however, the Colesrove case was reversed. The Court held that state apportionment did not constitute a political question. It recognized the rights of voters to challenge arbitrary apportionment by a state. The Court deftly dodged the political implications of the opinion by treating the dispute as one of constitutional limitations upon state power. "One man, one vote" became the watchword.

Legal Blitzkrieg

The effect was quick and wide-spread. Within a year of the decision thirty-six states were involved in reapportionment lawsuits. By the end of 1963 forty-two states were dealing with lawsuits, referendums, or actual reapportionments. In 1964 the Supreme Court applied judicial reapportionment to congressional districts as well. The same year the Court also ruled that both houses of state legislatures must be apportioned according to population, even when the voters of the state had approved another system. Finally, the Court required that in elections within political subdivisions, such as for school boards, the principle of electoral equality must be applied. By the end of the decade the political landscape of the United States had been radically altered, as virtually all election districts were redrawn to meet the one man, one vote standard.

Sources:

Robert H. Birkby, The Court and Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1983);

Gene Graham, One Man, One Vote (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).

BAKER V. CARR

The ideal of one person, one vote motivated the founders of the United States of America to establish a census when they drafted the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Although that ideal has not yet been fully realized—because the census still undercounts racial and ethnic minorities, among others—the country took a giant step closer to equal representation for every citizen nearly two centuries later, during the era of the civil rights movement. On March 26, 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case of Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 82 S. Ct. 691, 7 L. Ed. 2d 663 (1962), that state congressional districts of unequal size were unconstitutional. In a ruling that Chief Justice earl warren later called the most important of his tenure on the Court, Justice william j. brennan jr. wrote: "A citizen's right to vote free of arbitrary impairment by state action has been judicially recognized as a right secured by the Constitution."

Also significant because it examined the notion of "political questions" and whether courts could address them, the Baker case became a springboard for future apportionment lawsuits. In June 1964, the Supreme Court ruled on appeals from 15 states that had used Baker as a precedent, holding that both houses of a state legislature must be apportioned substantially on the basis of population. Within two years, every state had taken some type of apportionment action. By the late 1960s, congressional districts around the country had been redrawn to meet the Supreme Court's call for equal representation, and after the 1970 census, underrepresented urban areas were finally given an equal voice in Congress.

Every decade since 1790, U.S. citizens have complied with the Constitution and counted themselves. Whereas on its simplest level the census is a means to document historical changes in the U.S. population, it also determines how federal funds, power, political clout, and representation are divided, or apportioned, among the people of the United States. It was the notion of representation, more specifically equal representation, that compelled Charles W. Baker and other qualified voters in Tennessee to bring a lawsuit against Tennessee's secretary of state Joe C. Carr, on the grounds that the state's 1901 apportionment statute (Acts Tenn. 1901, c. 122) violated the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution. The plaintiffs argued that Tennessee's method of unequally apportioning the members of the general assembly among the state's 95 counties unconstitutionally deprived people in the state of equal protection of the laws and was obsolete because of a significant growth and population shift since 1900.

The plaintiffs' first round in court brought failure when a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee dismissed their complaint on December 21, 1959 (Baker, 179 F. Supp. 824). The panel dismissed the complaint on two grounds: (1) that the court lacked jurisdiction of the subject matter because it was a political question and(2) that the complaint failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted.

The plaintiffs appealed, and on November 21, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it had probable jurisdiction in the matter. This decision was significant because before the Supreme Court heard the Baker case, courts had abstained from addressing apportionment issues because they were considered political in nature. In the 1946 Supreme Court case Cole-grove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549, 66 S. Ct. 1198, 90 L. Ed. 1432 (1946), Justice felix frankfurter called apportionment a "political thicket" into which the judiciary should not venture. The subsequent ruling in Baker changed that interpretation, stating that federal courts possessed jurisdiction of the subject, that the citizens in Tennessee were entitled to relief, and that the federal district court in the state could settle the challenge to the apportionment statute of Tennessee.

In addressing the concern of some of his fellow Supreme Court justices, who warned that the matter before them was a political question and therefore not appropriately dealt with in a court of law, Justice Brennan carefully wrote—and rewrote, ten times—his opinion in the 1962 decision. Brennan stated: "The mere fact that the suit seeks protection of a political right does not mean it presents a political question. Such an objection is little more than a play upon words." He added that the plaintiffs' complaint did present a justiciable constitutional cause of action and that the Fourteenth Amendment did provide judicial protection to the right asserted. Justices Frankfurter and john marshall harlan dissented, stating that Brennan should not inject the Court "into the clash of political forces and political settlements." The Court's 6–2 ruling in favor of the plaintiffs forced state legislatures to reapportion their seats to reflect population shifts before the elections that were to occur in the fall of 1962. It also decreed one person, one vote as part of the United States' constitutional heritage and opened the door to challenging state voting procedures and malapportionment on constitutional grounds.

In his book Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age, former president jimmy carter described how revolutionary the Baker decision was in the 1960s and how it transformed state politics, especially southern politics. Carter wrote that the Georgia state government, like many others, proposed a number of stalling ploys, fake reapportionment plans, and other ways to avoid the shift in political power that the one-person, one-vote ruling had been designed to cause. "The beneficiaries of the [old] system were the ones now charged with … changing it," he wrote. "At the same time, they would be reducing drastically the relative voting strength of their own constituents. It was understandable that [they] would do everything possible to circumvent or postpone the effect of the court's mandate." Federal judges rejected the bogus plans, however, and by late summer 1962, the state's political process had been thrown wide open. Incumbent politicians were suddenly without districts, and new seats had opened up. In these circumstances, a few weeks before the election, Carter decided to run for the Georgia State Senate.

further readings

Charles, Guy-Uriel E. 2002. "Constitutional Pluralism and Democratic Politics: Reflections on the Interpretive Approach of Baker and Carr. North Carolina Law Review 80 (May).

"A Final Victory Marks the End of a Career." 1990. National Law Journal (August 13).

Fuentes-Rohwer, Luis. 2002. "Baker's Promise, Equal Protection, and the Modern Redistricting Revolution: A Plea for Rationality. North Carolina Law Review 80 (May).

"Koohi v. United States." 1993. Georgia Law Review 28 (fall).

Pushaw, Robert J., Jr. 2001."Bush v. Gore: Looking at Baker v. Carr in a Conservative Mirror." Constitutional Commentary 18 (summer).

Richie, Robert, and Steven Hill. 1999. Reflecting All of Us: The Case of Proportional Representation. Boston: Beacon.

Rush, Mark E. 1993. Does Redistricting Make a Difference? Partisan Representation and Electoral Behavior. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

"Some Implications of Arrow's Theorem for Voting Rights." 1995. Stanford Law Review 47 (January).

"The Trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs v. Yamasaki: The Application of the Political Question Doctrine to Hawaii's Public Land Trust Dispute." 1988. University of Hawaii Law Review 10 (winter).

"United States v. Alvarez-Machain: Waltzing with the Political Question Doctrine." 1994. Connecticut Law Review 26 (winter).

"U.S. Supreme Court." 1990. National Law Journal (June 4).

"When Restraint Requires Activism." 1990. Stanford Law Review 42 (July).

cross-references

Apportionment; Brennan, William Joseph, Jr.; Equal Protection; Failure to State a Claim; Fourteenth Amendment; Frankfurter, Felix; Political Question; Reynolds v. Sims; Voting.

BAKER V. CARR

BAKER V. CARR 369 U.S. 186 (1962), decided on 26 March 1962, arose in Tennessee, which in violation of its own constitution had not reapportioned its general assembly for over sixty years, maintaining rural, conservative control of the state legislature and leaving its more liberal urban areas severely underrepresented. Six of eight participating justices agreed that federal courts had jurisdiction to decide the complaints that Tennessee's malapportionment violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice William J. Brennan wrote the opinion, which was among the Warren Court's boldest constitutional decisions.

In Colegrove v. Green (1946) the Court had pronounced reapportionment among the political questions that traditionally were not appropriate for judicial decision. However, such restraint was inconsistent with the Warren Court's active protection of civil and political rights and with the post–New Deal Court's general philosophy of promoting the openness of the democratic process and protecting minorities. In the years following Baker v. Carr the Warren Court established the principle of one person, one vote, forcing a major realignment of representation in nearly every state, most of which had apportioned at least one house of their legislatures by some standard other than numerical representation. The decision encouraged Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made it illegal to discriminate against racial and other minorities in electoral districting. Sub-sequent Court decisions built upon both Baker v. Carr and the Voting Rights Act to encourage equal representation. But Baker v. Carr did not have the expected effect of shifting political power to more liberal urban areas. Instead it helped assure equal representation of the booming suburbs, whose representatives often joined those of rural areas to promote conservative social and economic policies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cortner, Richard C. The Apportionment Cases. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970.

Grofman, Bernard. Voting Rights, Voting Wrongs: The Legacy of "Baker v. Carr." New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1990.

Michael LesBenedict

See alsoApportionment ; Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

Baker v. Carr (1962).In this 6–2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court established that the Federal courts could decide cases involving the malapportionment of state legislatures. Previously, in Colegrove v. Green (1946), the Court held that matters relating to the fair apportionment of state legislative seats were a “political question” that should be considered only by elected officials.

Baker v. Carr involved the wide discrepancy in the numbers of voters living in different state legislative districts in Tennessee, which had ignored a state constitutional provision requiring periodic redistricting. Voters in the less populous rural districts enjoyed disproportionate political power, while those in larger urban districts had their voting power diluted and were thus denied the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

By taking the case, and thereby overruling the Colegrove decision, the Supreme Court opened the door to litigation to equalize the size of constituencies for all elective offices and established the principle of “one person, one vote.” In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), the Court held that U.S. congressional districts within a state must consist of roughly equal populations. The same year, the Court in Reynolds v. Sims extended the ruling to both the lower and upper houses of state legislatures.
See also Equality; Federalism; Suffrage.

Bibliography

David M. O'Brien , Storm Center, 2d ed., 1990.
Melvin I. Urofsky , The Continuity of Change, 1991.

Ross K. Baker

Baker v. Carr case decided in 1962 by the U.S. Supreme Court. Tennessee had failed to reapportion the state legislature for 60 years despite population growth and redistribution. Charles Baker, a voter, brought suit against the state (Joe Carr was a state official in charge of elections) in federal district court, claiming that the dilution of his vote as a result of the state's failure to reapportion violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The court dismissed the complaint on the grounds that it could not decide a political question. Baker appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that a case raising a political issue would be heard. This landmark decision opened the way for numerous suits on legislative apportionment .

Baker v. Carr (USA, 1962) The first of a series of Supreme Court decisions which undermined the custom of manipulating legislative apportionments at state and federal levels for political or racial purposes. Electoral boundaries had been drawn up to discriminate against Americans of Color. This decision ruled that population was the only acceptable basis for representation in the United States. Crucially, the Court ruled that the apportionment of seats was not simply a political question, but that it did fall within the purview of the judicative.