apportionment

1. 1. The act of apportioning.
   2. The condition of having been apportioned.
2. 1. The proportional distribution of the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives on the basis of the population of each state.
   2. Allotment of direct taxes on the basis of state population.

Division of a loss among insurance policies in the proportion that each policy bears to the total coverage applicable to the loss. For example, assume Policies A, B, C, and D have $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 and $80,000 of insurance in force, respectively: a total of $260,000 of coverage. Under the apportionment clause found in many property insurance policies, Policy A's percentage of any loss is 19.23%, Policy B's is 21.43%, Policy C's is 26.92%, and Policy D's is 30.77%.

1. the Prorating of property expenses, such as taxes and insurance, between buyer and seller.
Example: A house is sold on July 1. Property taxes, paid in Arrears are due on January 1 of the following year. At closing taxes are apportioned, so the seller pays the buyer one half of the estimated taxes as his share of the estimated tax payment due in January.

2. The partitioning of property into individual parcels by tenants in common.
Example: A sister and brother inherit a property and hold it as tenants in common. The brother wishes to sell. The property is apportioned into 2 separate parcels to allow for the sale.

3. The allocation of Unit Value to various counties in which a railroad or public utility operates.
Example: See Unit Value.

noun

The act of distributing or the condition of being distributed: admeasurement, allocation, assignment, dispensation, distribution, division. See collect/distribute.

Allocation of seats to regional units, or to parties under systems of proportional representation.

Territorial apportionment is usually a process of adjusting the seats allocated to each unit to reflect changes in population. Under the US Constitution, seats in the House of Representatives are divided among the states once every ten years (after each census), with no seat crossing a state line. The UK Boundary Commissions redistribute parliamentary seats every twelve to fifteen years, and normally no parliamentary seat crosses county boundaries.

Within territorial units, the apportionment process then involves the (re-)drawing of constituency boundaries (in the US known as redistricting, in India delimitation), usually with the aim of equalizing the population (or electorate) per seat, in accordance with the principle of ‘one person, one vote, one value’. This is usually done with regard to stated constraints of administrative convenience, contiguity, geographical, and communication factors; and unstated influences of party-political advantage. Such a process is open to political manipulation, or gerrymandering.

Alternatively, apportionment may refer to the allocation of seats according to the number of votes a party has received, particularly in the case of list proportional representation. In the Northern Ireland Assembly ministerial portfolios are apportioned according to the number of votes each party attained, according to the d'Hondt formula. Applications of apportionment have a common mathematical structure (and hence face common impossibility theorems) but this has not generally been realized by reformers who periodically reinvent systems of apportionment that are already in use under another name somewhere else. See d'Hondt; Sainte-Lagüe; Jefferson; Webster.

Apportionment is the decennial computation and assignment of seats in the House of Representatives to the individual states, or the allocation of legislative seats within a state. Article I, section 2, clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution as amended by the Fourteenth Amendment provides for the apportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives every ten years on the basis of population, except for the rule that each state shall have at least one representative. However, this constitutional provision is silent on how the congressmen are to be elected. To remedy the common practice of at-large or "winner take all" elections, the Apportionment Act of 1842 required single-member congressional districts, composed of contiguous, or adjoining, territory. In 1872 Congress legislated that all districts should contain "as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants," and in 1901 it passed a law requiring that districts should be of "compact territory."

Technically speaking, Congress apportions its House membership, and the states district themselves for the election of representatives. After the 1920 census, which showed for the first time that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, Congress was deadlocked on how to reapportion its House seats. To avoid future impasses, Congress in 1929 provided for a so-called permanent system of reapportionment that would discourage further growth in the size of the House and would obviate the necessity for further congressional action on the subject. Unfortunately, the 1929 reapportionment act did not specify that districts were to be contiguous, compact, and of equal size. The Supreme Court in Wood v. Broom (1932) ruled that those provisions were no longer in force. Thus, voters complaining of the inequity of districts of grossly unequal population and of gerrymandering could find no law in effect to prevent such practices. Not until Baker v. Carr in 1962 did the Court reverse itself and rule that federal courts could review apportionment cases. In 1964, in a six-to-three decision, the Supreme Court decided the case of Wesberry v. Sanders, ruling that congressional districts must be substantially equal in population. Departing from the precedent established in Baker, and also in Reynolds v. Sims earlier in the same year, the Court did not use the Fourteenth Amendment as its justification but based its decision on the history and wording of Article I, section 2, of the Constitution. The Court stated that this language means that "as nearly as is practicable, one man's vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another's."

The Supreme Court has also played a key role in the apportionment of state legislatures. Until the Supreme Court ruling in Baker v. Carr, constitutional standards by which apportionment should be measured were not established. In a group of six state legislative reapportionment cases—collectively known by the name of the first case, Reynolds v. Sims (1962)—the Supreme Court made these major points: the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause "requires that the seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis"; "mathematical exactness of precision" in carving out legislative districts may be impossible, but apportionments must be "based substantially on population"; "the so-called federal analogy is inapplicable as a sustaining precedent for state legislative apportionments"; and deviation from the one man, one vote rule for both houses is unconstitutional even if endorsed in a statewide initiative process or referendum because "a citizen's constitutional rights can hardly be infringed upon because a majority of the people choose to do so."

The equal population (one man, one vote) principle enunciated in Reynolds brought relief from decades of mal-apportionment. In spite of what the 1920 census revealed about urban and rural population, many state legislatures had refused to reapportion either congressional districts or state legislatures to reflect the change in population, thus allowing the rural areas to continue to hold the reins of political power. Rural areas were also legally favored in those states in which the state constitutions provided apportionment based partly or wholly on counties or towns rather than on population. The majority opinion in Reynolds did not attempt to spell out precise state constitutional tests because "what is marginally permissible in one state may be unsatisfactory in another." It endorsed a case-by-case development of standards and seemed to be requiring a good-faith effort to achieve "precise mathematical equality." Left unresolved were requirements for compactness and contiguousness of districts, and the constitutionality of multimember districts. By the early 2000s, apportionment remained a highly contentious and partisan issue, one that neither the Supreme Court nor the Congress had completely resolved.

Bibliography

Cain, Bruce E. The Reapportionment Puzzle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Eagles, Charles W. Democracy Delayed: Congressional Reapportionment and Urban-Rural Conflict in the 1920s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Schwab, Larry M. The Impact of Congressional Reapportionment and Redistricting. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988.

—Calvin B. T. Lee/A. G.

The process by which legislative seats are distributed among units entitled to representation. Determination of the number of representatives that a state, county, or other subdivision may send to a legislative body. The U.S. Constitution provides for a census every ten years, on the basis of which Congress apportions representatives according to population; but each state must have at least one representative. "Districting" is the establishment of the precise geographical boundaries of each such unit or constituency. Apportionment by state statute that denies the rule of one-person, one-vote is violative of equal protection of laws.

Also, the allocation of a charge or cost such as real estate taxes between two parties, often in the same ratio as the respective times that the parties are in possession or ownership of property during the fiscal period for which the charge is made or assessed.

Who are to be the electors of the Federal Representatives? Not the rich more than the poor; not the learned more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names, more than the humble sons of obscurity and unpropitious fortune. The electors are to be the great body of the people of the United States (James Madison, The Federalist No. 57)

The difference most relied upon, between American and other republics, consists in the principle of representation (James Madison, The Federalist No. 63)

James Madison and his fellow founders of the United States of America sought many objectives as they framed the U.S. Constitution. Among the goals these champions of democracy fought for was the notion of equal representation in government, by congresspeople, for citizens of the United States. To ensure that equal representation occurred, the founders proposed that the U.S. population be counted at regular intervals with a census. They later agreed, in the Great Compromise of 1787, that congressional representation should be assigned — in other words, apportioned — to various regions of the country based on a total population standard. Both article 1, section 2, clause 3, and amendment 14, section 2, of the Constitution provide that representatives shall be apportioned among the states according to their respective numbers and that a population count will be taken by census every ten years. Apportionment requires that each state's total population be divided by the population of "the ideal district" to determine the appropriate number of representatives. The population of an ideal district, for purposes of federal apportionment, is defined as the total population of the state (as determined by census) divided by one hundred (for the House of Representatives), or by fifty (for the Senate).

In the centuries that have followed the United States' adoption of the Constitution, apportionment for the federal Congress has been based on total population — with the exception that a slave, until the Civil War, was considered property and thus counted only as three-fifths of a white person. Efforts to limit federal congressional apportionment to only people who are citizens or voters have been defeated, because the exclusion of groups such as illegal aliens, nonvoters, and children could significantly affect some areas of the country, since some states have large populations of these groups. Shifting political power away from an area means fewer legislators to demand a fair share of government resources for that area. One such effort to exclude these groups, which occurred during the 1866 debates over the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, ultimately led to Congress's voting to continue basing apportionment on total population and to count the "whole number of persons in each state." In contrast, state legislatures have only been required to be based substantially on population since 1964 (Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 84 S. Ct. 1362, 12 L. Ed. 2d 506). In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court extended this requirement to municipal governments as well (Avery v. Midland County, 390 U.S. 474, 88 S. Ct. 1114, 20 L. Ed. 2d 45).

Apportionment is related to, but is not the same as, the electoral system and the districting process: apportionment is the manner in which representation is distributed; the electoral system is the way an individual representative is elected; and the districting process establishes the precise electoral boundaries of a representative's district. Apportionment for the U.S. Congress, which consists of the Senate and the House of Representatives, has always been determined by the Constitution. Each state is assigned two senators, who were originally elected by state legislatures but have since the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 been chosen by direct voter election.

Membership in the House of Representatives is also assigned to the states and is apportioned according to population, with each state being constitutionally guaranteed at least one representative. The House of Representatives grew proportionally with the population of the United States until 1912, when the House froze its size at 435 members. Since 1941, the Bureau of the Census has used the system of equal proportions to determine how many of the 435 representatives each state is entitled to have. This method, developed in 1920 by Professor Edward V. Huntington, of Harvard University, establishes the smallest possible difference between the representation of any two states, since a state's fair share of representatives will rarely be a whole number. The 1941 federal statute 2 U.S.C.A. §§ 2a and 2b provides that

under the "equal proportions" method, the priority list of states or counties among which Representatives in excess of one per state or county are to be allocated is obtained by dividing the population of each state or county by the geometric mean of successive numbers of Representatives.

Congress must decide how to treat the fractional components whenever it reapportions congressional seats based on new census data. This decision affects the distribution of only a few seats in Congress and the electoral college, but in closely contested matters, such as the presidential election of 1876, those seats could mean the difference between victory and defeat. (The electoral college is the body of electors of each state chosen to elect the president and vice president. Apportionment affects the electoral college because it influences the number of electoral votes coming from various areas of the country.) Each state legislature is responsible for establishing the district boundaries of the congressional seats apportioned to the state by the federal government.

From 1842 to 1911, Congress required that all congressional districts be of compact and connecting territory. That stipulation was not continued after 1912, and by the 1960s, the districts within some states differed greatly in size. These disparities were caused in some cases by gerrymandering, which is the process of drawing boundaries for election districts so as to give one party a greater political advantage. Large disparities led a group of urban Tennessee voters to bring suit against their state's electoral commission on the ground that the apportionment of the legislature was unfair. The Supreme Court's March 1962 decision in favor of the voters in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 82 S. Ct. 691, 7 L. Ed. 2d 663, established the rule that a citizen may bring suit against legislative malapportionment when it deprives that citizen of equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Previously, in Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549, 66 S. Ct. 1198, 90 L. Ed. 1432 (1946), the Court had refused to accept jurisdiction in apportionment cases.

Although the Supreme Court's decision in Baker was limited, it did rule that if a system other than one based on population is used for apportionment, the resulting districts must not be arbitrary or irrational in nature. In 1964, the Supreme Court extended Baker by ruling in Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1, 84 S. Ct. 526, 11 L. Ed. 2d 481, that legislative districts for the House of Representatives must be drawn so as to provide "equal representation for equal numbers of people," a concept often referred to as the "one-person, one-vote" standard. Later that same year, in lawsuits directly involving fifteen states, the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 84 S. Ct. 1362, 12 L. Ed. 2d 506, that districts for state legislatures must also be substantially equal in population. Further extending the principle, the Court ruled in Avery v. Midland County, 390 U.S. 474, 88 S. Ct. 1114, 20 L. Ed. 2d 45 (1968), that if county, city, and town governments elect their representatives from individual districts, the districts must be substantially equal in population.

Other individuals and states have subsequently challenged the method of apportionment used in the United States when that method has proved unfavorable for them. For example, in Franklin v. Massachusetts, 505 U.S. 788, 112 S. Ct. 2767, 120 L. Ed. 2d 636 (1992), Massachusetts and two of its registered voters filed an action against U.S. Secretary of Commerce Barbara B. Franklin, alleging, among other things, that the decision to allocate overseas employees was inconsistent with the Constitution. In June 1992, the Court reversed a federal district court decision in favor of Massachusetts, ruling that the allocation of overseas federal employees to their designated home states was consistent with the "usual-residence" standard used in early censuses and served the purpose of making representation in Congress more equal.

The state of Montana also sued the U.S. Department of Commerce, following the 1990 census, when it and eleven other states each lost one House seat. In seeking to keep the two seats it had held since 1910, Montana argued that the method of equal proportions was unconstitutional because it left the state with a single congressional district of 803,655 people — a number almost 40 percent larger than "ideal district size," which is a national average of 572,466 people. Montana also alleged that the variance between the single district's population and that of an ideal district could not be justified under the one-person, one-vote standard developed in Wesberry. The Montana case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in March 1992 unanimously upheld the method Congress uses to reallocate congressional seats among the states after a census (United States Department of Commerce v. Montana, 503 U.S. 442, 112 S. Ct. 1415, 118 L. Ed. 2d 87).

See: Baker v. Carr; Congress of the United States; Electoral College; Equal Protection; Fourteenth Amendment; Gerrymander; Reynolds v. Sims.

(DOD) In the general sense, distribution for planning of limited resources among competing requirements. Specific apportionments (e.g., air sorties and forces for planning) are described as apportionment of air sorties and forces for planning, etc. See also allocation; apportionment (air).

The allocation of seats in a legislature or of taxes according to a plan. In the United States Congress, for example, the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives is based on the relative population of each state, whereas the apportionment in the Senate is based on equal representation for every state. (See also gerrymander.)

This article may need to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information, and remove this template when finished. Please see the talk page for more information.

This article is about "apportionment" in law. See also apportionment (politics)

The legal term apportionment (French apportionement; Med. Latin apportionamentum; derived from Latin portio, share) means distribution or allotment in proper shares.

It is a term used in law in a variety of senses. Sometimes it is employed roughly and has no technical meaning; this indicates the distribution of a benefit (e.g. salvage or damages under the Fatal Accidents Act 1846, § 2), or liability (e.g. general average contributions, or tithe rent-charge), or the incidence of a duty (e.g. obligations as to the maintenance of highways).

In its strict legal interpretation apportionment falls into two classes: "apportionment in respect of estate" and "apportionment in respect of time."

Contents 1 Apportionment in respect of estate 1.1 Apportionment by act of the parties 1.2 Apportionment by operation of law 2 Apportionment in respect of time 2.1 Apportionment of rent 2.2 Apportionment of income 3 References

Apportionment in respect of estate

Apportionment in respect of estate may result either from the act of the parties or from the operation of law.

Apportionment by act of the parties

Where a lessee is evicted from, or surrenders or forfeits possession of part of the property leased to him, he becomes liable at common law to pay only a rent apportioned to the value of the interest which he still retains. So where the person entitled to the reversion of an estate assigns part of it, the right to an apportioned part of the rent incident to the whole reversion passes to his assignee. The lessee is not bound, however, by an apportionment of rent made upon the grant of part of the reversion unless it is made either with his consent or by the verdict of a jury. The assignee of the reversion of part of demised premises could not, at common law, re-enter for breach of a condition, inasmuch as a condition of re-entry in a lease could not at common law be apportioned. But this has now been altered by statute both in England,^[1] and in many of the British colonies.^[2] In the cases just mentioned there is apportionment in respect of estate by act of the parties.

Apportionment by operation of law

Apportionment by operation of law may be brought about where by act of law a lease becomes inoperative as regards its subject-matter, or by the "act of God", as, for instance, where part of an estate is submerged by the encroachments of the sea. To the same category belongs the apportionment of rent which takes place under various statutes (e.g. the Lands Clauses Consolidation Act 1845, § 119, when land is required for public purposes; the Agricultural Holdings Act 1883, § 41, in the case of a tenant from year to year receiving notice to quit part of a holding; and the Irish Land Act 1903 § 61, apportionment of quit and crown rents).

Apportionment in respect of time

At common law, there was no apportionment of rent in respect of time. Such apportionment was, however, in certain cases allowed in England by the Distress for Rent Act 1737, and the Apportionment Act 1834, and is now allowed generally. Under that statute (§2) all rents, annuities, dividends and other periodical payments in the nature of income are to be considered as accruing from day to day and to be apportionable in respect of time accordingly. It is provided, however, that the apportioned part of such rents, etc., shall only be payable or recoverable in the case of a continuing payment, when the entire portion of which it forms part itself becomes payable, and, in the case of a payment determined by re-entry, death or otherwise, only when the next entire portion would have been payable if it had not so determined (§ 3). Persons entitled to apportioned parts of rent have the same remedies for recovering them when payable as they would have had in respect of the entire rent; but a lessee is not to be liable for any apportioned part specifically. The rent is recoverable by the heir or other person who would, but for the apportionment, be entitled to the entire rent, and he holds it subject to distribution (§ 4). The Apportionment Act 1870 extends to payments not made under any instrument in writing (§2), but not to annual sums made payable in policies of insurance (§ 6). Apportionment under the act can be excluded by express stipulation.

The apportionment created by this statute is "apportionment in respect of time." The cases to which it applies are mainly cases of either:

1. apportionment of rent due under leases where at a time between the dates fixed for payment the lessor or lessee dies, or some other alteration in the position of parties occurs; or
2. apportionment of income between the representatives of a limited owner and the remainder-man when the limited interest determines at a time between the date when such income became due.

Apportionment of rent

With regard to the former of these classes, it may be noticed that although apportioned rent becomes payable only when the whole rent is due, the landlord, in the case of the bankruptcy of an ordinary tenant, may prove for a proportionate part of the rent up to the date of the receiving order;^[3] and that a similar rule holds good in the winding up of a company;^[4] and further that the act of 1870 applies to the liability to pay, as well as to the right to receive, rent.^[5] Accordingly where an assignment of a lease is made between two half-yearly rent-days, the assignee is not liable to pay the full amount of the half-year's rent falling due on the rent-day next after the date of the assignment, but only an apportioned part of that half-year's rent, computed from the last mentioned date.^[6]

Apportionment of income

With regard to the apportionment of income, the only points requiring notice here are that all dividends payable by public companies are apportionable, whether paid at fixed periods or not, unless the payment is, in effect, a payment of capital (§ 5).

References

1. ^ Law of Property Amendment Act 1859, § 3; Conveyancing Act 1881, § 12.
2. ^ For example, Ontario, Rev. Stats., 1897, c. 170, § 9; Barbados, No. 12 of 1891, § 9.
3. ^ Bankruptcy Act 1883, Sched. ii. r. 19.
4. ^ In South Kensington Co-operative Stores, 1881, 17 Ch.D. 161.
5. ^ Wilson, 1893, 62 L.J.Q.B. 628, 632.
6. ^ Glass v. Patterson, 1902, 2 Ir.R. 660.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)