Baker v. Carr

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(1962) U.S. Supreme Court case that forced the Tennessee legislature to reapportion itself on the basis of population. The case ended the traditional overrepresentation of rural areas in the legislature and established that the court may intervene in apportionment cases. The court ruled that every citizen's vote should carry equal weight, regardless of the voter's place of residence. Its ruling in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) built on Baker by requiring virtually every state legislature to be reapportioned, ultimately causing political power in most states to shift from rural to urban areas.

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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

• 369 U.S. 186 (1962)
• Vote: 6–2
• For the Court: Brennan
• Concurring: Stewart and Clark
• Dissenting: Frankfurter and Harlan
• Not participating: Whittaker

In 1959, Charles Baker was mayor of Millington, Tennessee, a rapidly growing suburb of Memphis. He requested help from the state government in coping with the problems of urban growth. But he got no satisfaction because the urban areas of Tennessee were underrepresented in the state legislature. By contrast, the rural areas of the state were overrepresented. Approximately 11 percent of the population lived in rural areas of Tennessee, but more than 50 percent of the representatives in the state legislature were elected by the rural areas of the state. The outcome was neglect of the problems and the needs of urban people. The floor leader of the Tennessee House of Representatives said: “I believe in collecting the taxes where the money is—in the cities—and spending it where it's needed—in the country.”

Charles Baker decided that the only way to solve the financial problems of Tennessee's cities was to force the government to reapportion the legislature—to draw the legislative districts equally according to population. In this way every citizen of the state, whether living in a rural or urban area, would be represented equally in the legislature—the principle of “one person, one vote.” People's votes are equal when each member of the legislature represents about the same number of people. Charles Baker brought suit against Joseph Cordell Carr, the Tennessee secretary of state, to force reapportionment of the legislature. But the federal district court dismissed the suit because the issue was political rather than legal. Thus, according to the trial court, the question should be resolved by the political (legislative and executive) branches of government, not the judicial branch (the courts).

The Issue

Baker argued that urban voters in Tennessee were denied the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. He requested that the state be ordered to equalize its legislative districts so that each person's vote was of equal weight. The Supreme Court, however, restricted its decision to questions of jurisdiction, standing, and justiciability. Did the court have the jurisdiction (authority) to make decisions about state legislative apportionment? Did Baker have standing (the right) to bring suit in a case of this kind? And was this issue appropriate for judicial decision or should it be left to the political branches of the government to decide?

Opinion of the Court

Justice William Brennan, writing for the Supreme Court, ruled that the Court had jurisdiction in this case, Baker had standing to bring suit, and the issue was justiciable. He wrote that “the right [to equal districts in the Tennessee legislature] is within the reach of judicial protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Although the Court limited its decision to the questions of jurisdiction, standing, and justiciability, Justice Brennan clearly stated that failure to apportion legislative districts of a state equally was a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. He concluded that Baker was entitled to a trial, so the case was sent back to the federal district court.

Dissent

Justice Felix Frankfurter and Justice John Marshall Harlan II strongly dissented. Frankfurter argued that the issue was essentially political, not judicial, and should be left to the legislative and executive branches to decide. Harlan argued that there was nothing in the U.S. Constitution that required state legislatures to be apportioned so as to equally represent each voter.

Significance

This case was the first in a series that led to legislative reapportionment throughout the country. The culminating case was Reynolds v. Sims (1964), in which the Court decided that states were required to establish equally populated electoral districts for both houses of the state legislature. Within one year of the decision in Baker v. Carr, 36 states were involved in lawsuits about legislative reapportionment. Eventually, every state of the United States was required to redraw its legislative districts to provide equal representation for all voters of the state.

U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called the Baker decision “a landmark in the development of representative government.” And Chief Justice Earl Warren, near the end of his life, called this case the most important one decided during his 16 years as chief justice.

See also Reynolds v. Sims

Sources

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

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 Les Benedict

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 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 fifteen 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 ninety-five 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 Colegrove 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. Stated Brennan, "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, saying 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 said. "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.

See: Apportionment; Equal Protection; Failure to State a Claim; Political Question.

by William J. Brennan, Jr., 1962

While the Constitution provides for the apportionment of congressional representatives among states, it does not determine whether the representatives apportioned to each state shall be elected from districts or by the state at large. The custom of electing representatives by district is now universal, but the state legislatures have wide discretion in drawing district boundary lines; for example, many legislatures use county and town boundaries in determining the districts, while others use weighted ratios to give additional representation to certain areas. The delineation of congressional districts frequently allows one party to gain a definite plurality, and in most cases the state legislatures are reluctant to redistrict at all if doing so would jeopardize the political future of incumbent members. One prevalent charge directed at rural-dominated state legislatures is that of drawing boundary lines for congressional districts in such a way as to deprive urban and suburban areas of full representation. Metropolitan areas had no legal redress for this practice until 1962, when the Supreme Court, in Baker v. Carr, ruled that the federal courts could hear complaints in cases where voters alleged that they had been deprived of proper representation by gross malapportionment of legislative districts. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., delivered the Court's opinion, part of which is reprinted here, on March 26, 1962.

This civil action was brought under 42 U.S.C. Sections 1983 and 1988 to redress the alleged deprivation of federal constitutional rights. The complaint, alleging that by means of a 1901 statute of Tennessee apportioning the members of the General Assembly among the state's ninety-five counties, "these plaintiffs and others similarly situated are denied the equal protection of the laws accorded them by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States by virtue of the debasement of their votes," was dismissed by a three-judge court convened under 28 U.S.C. Section 2281 in the Middle District of Tennessee. The court held that it lacked jurisdiction of the subject matter and also that no claim was stated upon which relief could be granted. ... We noted probable jurisdiction of the appeal. ... We hold that the dismissal was in error, and remand the cause to the District Court for trial and further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

The General Assembly of Tennessee consists of the Senate with thirty-three members and the House of Representatives with ninety-nine members. The Tennessee Constitution provides in Article II as follows:

Section 3. Legislative authority - Term of office. - The legislative authority of this state shall be vested in a General Assembly, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives, both dependent on the people; who shall hold their offices for two years from the day of the general election.

Section 4. Census. - An enumeration of the qualified voters, and apportionment of the representatives in the General Assembly, shall be made in the year 1871, and within every subsequent term of ten years.

Section 5. Apportionment of representatives. - The number of representatives shall, at the several periods of making the enumeration, be apportioned among the several counties or districts, according to the number of qualified voters in each; and shall not exceed seventy-five, until the population of the state shall be one million and a half, and shall never exceed ninety-nine; Provided, that any county having two-thirds of the ratio shall be entitled to one member.

Section 6. Apportionment of senators. - The number of senators shall, at the several periods of making the enumeration, be apportioned among the several counties or districts according to the number of qualified electors in each, and shall not exceed one-third the number of representatives. In apportioning the senators among the different counties, the fraction that may be lost by any county or counties, in the apportionment of members to the House of Representatives, shall be made up to such county or counties in the Senate, as near as may be practicable. When a district is composed of two or more counties, they shall be adjoining; and no county shall be divided in forming a district.

Thus, Tennessee's standard for allocating legislative representation among her counties is the total number of qualified voters resident in the respective counties, subject only to minor qualifications.

Decennial reapportionment in compliance with the constitutional scheme was effected by the General Assembly each decade from 1871 to 1901. The 1871 apportionment was preceded by an 1870 statute requiring an enumeration. The 1881 apportionment involved three statutes: the first authorizing an enumeration; the second enlarging the Senate from twenty-five to thirty-three members and the House from seventy-five to ninety-nine members; and the third apportioning the membership of both Houses. In 1891 there were both an enumeration and an apportionment. In 1901 the General Assembly abandoned separate enumeration in favor of reliance upon the federal census and passed the Apportionment Act here in controversy. In the more than sixty years since that action, all proposals in both houses of the General Assembly for reapportionment have failed to pass.

Between 1901 and 1961, Tennessee has experienced substantial growth and redistribution of her population. In 1901 the population was 2,020,616, of whom 487,380 were eligible to vote. The 1960 federal census reports the state's population at 3,567,089, of whom 2,092,891 are eligible to vote. The relative standings of the counties in terms of qualified voters have changed significantly. It is primarily the continued application of the 1901 Apportionment Act to this shifted and enlarged voting population which gives rise to the present controversy.

Indeed, the complaint alleges that the 1901 statute, even as of the time of its passage, "made no apportionment of representatives and senators in accordance with the constitutional formula ... but instead arbitrarily and capriciously apportioned representatives in the Senate and House without reference ... to any logical or reasonable formula whatever." It is further alleged that "because of the population changes since 1900 and the failure of the legislature to reapportion itself since 1901," the 1901 statute became "unconstitutional and obsolete." Appellants also argue that, because of the composition of the legislature effected by the 1901 Apportionment Act, redress in the form of a state constitutional amendment to change the entire mechanism for reapportioning, or any other change short of that, is difficult or impossible.

The complaint concludes that "these plaintiffs and others similarly situated, are denied the equal protection of the laws accorded them by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States by virtue of the debasement of their votes." They seek a declaration that the 1901 statute is unconstitutional and an injunction restraining the appellees from acting to conduct any further elections under it. They also pray that unless and until the General Assembly enacts a valid reapportionment, the District Court should either decree a reapportionment by mathematical application of the Tennessee constitutional formulae to the most recent federal census figures, or direct the appellees to conduct legislative elections, primary and general, at large. They also pray for such other and further relief as may be appropriate. ...

In light of the District Court's treatment of the case, we hold today only (a) that the court possessed jurisdiction of the subject matter; (b) that a justiciable cause of action is stated upon which appellants would be entitled to appropriate relief; and (c) because appellees raise the issue before this Court, that the appellants have standing to challenge the Tennessee apportionment statutes. Beyond noting that we have no cause at this stage to doubt the District Court will be able to fashion relief if violations of constitutional rights are found, it is improper now to consider what remedy would be most appropriate if appellants prevail at the trial.

The District Court was uncertain whether our cases withholding federal judicial relief rested upon a lack of federal jurisdiction or upon the inappropriateness of the subject matter for judicial consideration - what we have designated "nonjusticiability." The distinction between the two grounds is significant. In the instance 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 asserted can be judicially molded.

In the instance of lack of jurisdiction the cause either does not "arise under" the federal constitution, laws, or treaties (or fall within one of the other enumerated categories of Article III, Section 2), or is not a "case or controversy" within the meaning of that section; or the cause is not one described by any jurisdictional statute. Our conclusion ... that this cause presents no nonjusticiable "political question" settles the only possible doubt that it is a case or controversy. Under the present heading of "Jurisdiction of the Subject Matter" we hold only that the matter set forth in the complaint does arise under the Constitution and is within 28 U.S.C. Section 1343.

Article III, Section 2, of the federal Constitution provides that "The judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority. ..." It is clear that the cause of action is one which "arises under" the federal Constitution. The complaint alleges that the 1901 statute effects an apportionment that deprives the appellants of the equal protection of the laws in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Dismissal of the complaint upon the ground of lack of jurisdiction of the subject matter would, therefore, be justified only if that claim were "so attenuated and unsubstantial as to be absolutely devoid of merit" ... or "frivolous." ... That the claim is unsubstantial must be "very plain." ... Since the District Court obviously and correctly did not deem the asserted federal constitutional claim unsubstantial and frivolous, it should not have dismissed the complaint for want of jurisdiction of the subject matter. And of course no further consideration of the merits its of the claim is relevant to a determination of the court's jurisdiction of the subject matter. ...

Since the complaint plainly sets forth a case arising under the Constitution, the subject matter is within the federal judicial power defined in Article III, Section 2, and so within the power of Congress to assign to the jurisdiction of the District Courts. Congress has exercised that power in 28 U.S.C. Section 1343 (3):

The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action authorized by law to be commenced by any person ... [t]o redress the deprivation, under color of any state law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom or usage, of any right, privilege or immunity secured by the Constitution of the United States. ...

An unbroken line of our precedents sustains the federal courts' jurisdiction of the subject matter of federal constitutional claims of this nature. ...

A federal court cannot "pronounce any statute, either of a state or of the United States, void, because irreconcilable with the Constitution, except as it is called upon to adjudge the legal rights of litigants in actual controversies." ... Have the appellants alleged such a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy as to assume that concrete adverseness which sharpens the presentation of issues upon which the court so largely depends for illumination of difficult constitutional questions? This is the gist of the question of standing. It is, of course, a question of federal law.

The complaint was filed by residents of Davidson, Hamilton, Knox, Montgomery, and Shelby counties. Each is a person allegedly qualified to vote for members of the General Assembly representing his county. These appellants sued "on their own behalf and on behalf of all qualified voters of their respective counties, and further, on behalf of all voters of the State of Tennessee who are similarly situated. ..." The appellees are the Tennessee secretary of state, attorney general, coordinator of elections, and members of the State Board of Elections; the members of the State Board are sued in their own right and also as representatives of the County Election Commissioners whom they appoint.

We hold that the appellants do have standing to maintain this suit. Our decisions plainly support this conclusion. Many of the cases have assumed rather than articulated the premise in deciding the merits of similar claims. And Colegrove v. Green ... squarely held that voters who allege facts showing disadvantage to themselves as individuals have standing to sue. A number of cases decided after Colegrove recognized the standing of the voters there involved to bring those actions.

These appellants seek relief in order to protect or vindicate an interest of their own, and of those similarly situated. Their constitutional claim is, in substance, that the 1901 statute constitutes arbitrary and capricious state action, offensive to the Fourteenth Amendment in its irrational disregard of the standard of apportionment prescribed by the state's constitution or of any standard, effecting a gross disproportion of representation to voting population. The injury which appellants assert is that this classification disfavors the voters in the counties in which they reside, placing them in a position of constitutionally unjustifiable inequality vis-à-vis voters in irrationally favored counties. A citizen's right to a vote free of arbitrary impairment by state action has been judicially recognized as a right secured by the Constitution, when such impairment resulted from dilution by a false tally ... or by a refusal to count votes from arbitrarily selected precincts ... or by a stuffing of the ballot box. ...

It would not be necessary to decide whether appellants' allegations of impairment of their votes by the 1901 apportionment will, ultimately, entitle them to any relief, in order to hold that they have standing to seek it. If such impairment does produce a legally cognizable injury, they are among those who have sustained it. They are asserting "a plain, direct and adequate interest in maintaining the effectiveness of their votes" ... not merely a claim of "the right, possessed by every citizen, to require that the Government be administered according to law. ..." They are entitled to a hearing and to the District Court's decision on their claims. "The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury." Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 163.

In holding that the subject matter of this suit was not justiciable, the District Court relied on Colegrove v. Green, supra, and subsequent per curiam cases. The court stated: "From a review of these decisions there can be no doubt that the federal rule ... is that the federal courts ... will not intervene in cases of this type to compel legislative reapportionment." ... We understand the District Court to have read the cited cases as compelling the conclusion that since the appellants sought to have a legislative apportionment held unconstitutional, their suit presented a "political question" and was therefore nonjusticiable. We hold that this challenge to an apportionment presents no nonjusticiable "political question." The cited cases do not hold the contrary.

Of course 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." ... Rather, it is argued that apportionment cases, whatever the actual wording of the complaint, can involve no federal constitutional right except one resting on the guaranty of a republican form of government, and that complaints based on that clause have been held to present political questions which are nonjusticiable.

We hold that the claim pleaded here neither rests upon nor implicates the Guaranty Clause and that its justiciability is therefore not foreclosed by our decisions of cases involving that clause. The District Court misinterpreted Colegrove v. Green and other decisions of this Court on which it relied. Appellants' claim that they are being denied equal protection is justiciable, and if "discrimination is sufficiently shown, the right to relief under the equal protection clause is not diminished by the fact that the discrimination relates to political rights." ...

It is apparent that several formulations which vary slightly according to the settings in which the questions arise may describe a political question, although each has one or more elements which identify it as essentially a function of the separation of powers. Prominent on the surface of any case held to involve a political question 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 the 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.

Unless one of these formulations is inextricable from the case at bar, there should be no dismissal for nonjusticiability on the ground of a political question's presence. The doctrine of which we treat is one of "political questions," not one of "political cases." The courts cannot reject as "no law suit" a bona-fide controversy as to whether some action denominated "political" exceeds constitutional authority. The cases we have reviewed show the necessity for discriminating inquiry into the precise facts and posture of the particular case, and the impossibility of resolution by any semantic cataloguing.

But it is argued that this case shares the characteristics of decisions that constitute a category not yet considered, cases concerning the Constitution's guaranty, in Article IV, Section 4, of a republican form of government. A conclusion as to whether the case at bar does present a political question cannot be confidently reached until we have considered those cases with special care. We shall discover that Guaranty Clause claims involve those elements which define a "political question," and for that reason and no other, they are nonjusticiable. In particular, we shall discover that the nonjusticiability of such claims has nothing to do with their touching upon matters of state governmental organization. ...

We come, finally, to the ultimate inquiry whether our precedents as to what constitutes a nonjusticiable "political question" bring the case before us under the umbrella of that doctrine. A natural beginning is to note whether any of the common characteristics which we have been able to identify and label descriptively are present. We find none. The question here is the consistency of state action with the federal Constitution. We have no question decided, or to be decided, by a political branch of government coequal with this Court. Nor do we risk embarrassment of our government abroad or grave disturbance at home if we take issue with Tennessee as to the constitutionality of her action here challenged. Nor need the appellants, in order to succeed in this action, ask the Court to enter upon policy determinations for which judicially manageable standards are lacking. Judicial standards under the Equal Protection Clause are well developed and familiar, and it has been open to courts since the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment to determine, if on the particular facts they must, that a discrimination reflects no policy, but simply arbitrary and capricious action.

This case does, in one sense, involve the allocation of political power within a state, and the appellants might conceivably have added a claim under the Guaranty Clause. Of course, as we have seen, any reliance on that clause would be futile. But because any reliance on the Guaranty Clause could not have succeeded, it does not follow that appellants may not be heard on the equal protection claim which in fact they tender. True, it must be clear that the Fourteenth Amendment claim is not so enmeshed with those political question elements which render Guaranty Clause claims nonjusticiable as actually to present a political question itself. But we have found that not to be the case here. ...

We conclude that the complaint's allegations of a denial of equal protection present a justiciable constitutional cause of action upon which appellants are entitled to a trial and a decision. The right asserted is within the reach of judicial protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The judgment of the District Court is reversed and the cause is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Baker v. Carr
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 19–20, 1961 Reargued October 9, 1961 Decided March 26, 1962
Full case name	Charles W. Baker et al. v. Joe. C. Carr et al.
Citations	369 U.S. 186 (more) 82 S. Ct. 691; 7 L. Ed. 2d 663; 1962 U.S. LEXIS 1567
Prior history	179 F. Supp. 824 (M.D. Tenn. 1959), probable jurisdiction noted, 364 U.S. 898 (1960). Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee
Subsequent history	206 F. Supp. 341 (M.D. Tenn. 1962)
Holding
The reapportionment of state legislative districts is not a political question, and thus is justiciable by the federal courts.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · Felix Frankfurter William O. Douglas · Tom C. Clark John M. Harlan II · William J. Brennan, Jr. Charles E. Whittaker · Potter Stewart
Case opinions
Majority	Brennan, joined by Black, Warren
Concurrence	Douglas, joined by Clark, Stewart
Dissent	Frankfurter, joined by Harlan
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV; U.S. Const. art. III; 42 U.S.C. § 1983; Tenn. Const. art. II

Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that retreated from the Court's political question doctrine, deciding that reapportionment (attempts to change the way voting districts are delineated) issues present justiciable questions, thus enabling federal courts to intervene in and to decide reapportionment cases. The defendants unsuccessfully argued that reapportionment of legislative districts is a "political question," and hence not a question that may be resolved by federal courts.

Contents 1 Background 2 The Court's decision 3 Aftermath 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

Background

Plaintiff Charles Baker was a Republican who lived in Shelby County, Tennessee, the county in which Memphis is located. The Tennessee State Constitution required that legislative districts be redrawn every ten years according to the federal census to provide for districts of substantially equal population. Baker's complaint was that Tennessee had not in fact redistricted since the census of 1901. By the time of Baker's lawsuit, the population had shifted such that his district in Shelby County had about ten times as many residents as some of the rural districts. Representationally, the votes of rural citizens were worth more than the votes of urban citizens. Baker's argument was that this discrepancy was causing him to fail to receive the "equal protection of the laws" required by the Fourteenth Amendment. Defendant Joe Carr was sued in his position as Secretary of State for Tennessee. Carr was not the person who set the district lines – the state legislature had done that – but was sued ex officio as the person who was ultimately responsible for the conduct of elections in the state and for the publication of district maps. The State of Tennessee argued that legislative districts were essentially political questions, not judicial ones, as had been held by a plurality opinion of the Court in Colegrove v. Green (1946), wherein Justice Felix Frankfurter declared that, "Courts ought not to enter this political thicket." Frankfurter believed that relief for legislative malapportionment had to be won through the political process.^{[citation needed]}

The Court's decision

The decision of Baker v. Carr was one of the most wrenching in the Court's history. The case had to be put over for reargument because in conference no clear majority emerged for either side of the case. Justice Charles Evans Whittaker was so torn over the case that he eventually had to recuse himself, and the arduous decisional process in Baker is often blamed for Whittaker's subsequent health problems, which forced him to resign from the Court.

The opinion was finally handed down in March 1962, nearly a year after it was initially argued. The Court split 6 to 2 in ruling that Baker's case was justiciable, producing, in addition to the opinion of the Court by Justice William J. Brennan, three concurring opinions and two dissenting opinions. Brennan reformulated the political question doctrine, proposing a six-part test for determining which questions were "political" in nature. Cases which are political in nature are marked by:

1. "Textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department;" as an example of this, Brennan cited issues of foreign affairs and executive war powers, arguing that cases involving such matters would be "political questions"

2. "A lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards for resolving it;"

3. "The impossibility of deciding without an initial policy determination of a kind clearly for nonjudicial discretion;"

4. "The impossibility of a court's undertaking independent resolution without expressing lack of the respect due coordinate branches of government;"

5. "An unusual need for unquestioning adherence to a political decision already made;"

6. "The potentiality of embarrassment from multifarious pronouncements by various departments on one question."

Justice Tom C. Clark switched his vote at the last minute to a concurrence on the substance of Baker's claims, which would have enabled a majority which could have granted relief for Baker, but instead the Supreme Court remanded the case to the District Court. Frankfurter, joined by John Marshall Harlan II, dissented vigorously and at length, arguing that the Court had shunted aside history and judicial restraint and violated the separation of powers between legislatures and Courts.

The large majority in this case can in many ways be attributed to Justice Brennan, who convinced Potter Stewart that the case was a narrow ruling dealing only with plaintiff power to challenge the statute. Brennan also talked down Justices Black and Douglas from their usual absolutist positions to achieve a compromise.^[1]

Aftermath

United States Federal civil procedure doctrines
Justiciability
Advisory opinions
Standing · Ripeness · Mootness
Political questions
Jurisdiction
Subject-matter jurisdiction:
Federal question jurisdiction
Diversity jurisdiction
Supplemental jurisdiction
Removal jurisdiction
Amount in controversy
Class Action Fairness Act of 2005
Personal jurisdiction:
Jurisdiction in rem
Minimum contacts
Federalism
Erie doctrine · Abstention
Sovereign immunity · Abrogation
Rooker-Feldman doctrine
Adequate and independent state ground
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Having declared reapportionment issues justiciable in Baker, the court laid out a new test for evaluating such claims in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964). In Gray v. Sanders, the Court formulated the famous "one-person, one-vote" standard for legislative districting, holding that each individual had to be weighted equally in legislative apportionment. The Court decided that in states with bicameral legislatures both houses had to be apportioned on this standard, voiding the provision of the Arizona Constitution which had provided for two state senators from each county and similar provisions elsewhere. (Even the Tennessee Constitution, enforcement of which was the original basis for the case, has a provision which prevented counties from being "split" and portions of a county being attached to other counties or parts of counties in the creation of a district which was overridden, and today counties are frequently split among districts in forming Tennessee State Senate districts.) However, "One-person, one-vote" was first applied as a standard for congressional districts in 1964's Wesberry v. Sanders.

Baker v. Carr and subsequent cases fundamentally altered the nature of political representation in America, requiring not just Tennessee but nearly every state to redistrict during the 1960s, often several times. This re-apportionment increased the political power of urban centers and limited the influence of more rural, conservative interests that had benefited from the Supreme Court ruling injusticiable such "political" questions as those of apportionment.^[2] After he left the Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren called the Baker v. Carr line of cases the most important in his tenure as Chief Justice.^[3]

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 369
• One man, one vote

References

1. ^ Eisler (1993), p. 13.
2. ^ Eisler (1993), p. 11.
3. ^ Bernard Schwartz, How Justice Brennan Changed America, in Reason and Passion 33 (E. Joshua Rosenkranz and Bernard Schwartz eds., 1997).

Further reading

• Eisler, Kim Isaac (1993). A Justice for All: William J. Brennan, Jr., and the decisions that transformed America. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671767879. 
• Peltason, Jack W. (1992). "Baker v. Carr". in Hall, Kermit L. (ed.). The Oxford companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 67–70. ISBN 0195058356. 
• Tushnet, Mark (2008). I dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 151–166. ISBN 9780807000366. 

External links

• Works related to Baker v. Carr at Wikisource
• Full text of the decision courtesy of Findlaw.com
• Listen to oral arguments in this case or download as MP3
• Baker v. Carr Case Brief at Lawnix.com

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