Democracy, the Courts, and the Liberal State by David Miles

Author:David Miles [Miles, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Comparative Politics, Law, Constitutional
ISBN: 9780429534942
Google: eEX8DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-10-26T02:08:17+00:00

Overview

Case summary—Baker v Carr and Reynolds v Sims

Baker v Carr (1962a) arose from a federal court action filed against the State of Tennessee by a number of officials from across the state on behalf of qualified voters in underrepresented areas. The case against Tennessee hinged on the failure of legislatures since the turn of the century to meet their constitutional requirement to reapportion. The attorneys sought to show that this failure to reapportion constituted a violation of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the maldistribution of state revenues arising out of the malapportionment demonstrated a pattern of discrimination against urban voters. The case was dismissed by the three judge district federal court, who noted that the state legislature was “guilty of a clear violation of the state constitution”, but that on the basis of the precedent set by Colegrove v Green (1946) the remedy did not lie with the courts. The case was then appealed directly to the Supreme Court (see Smith, 2014: 57–67).

Reynolds v Sims (1964) was one of dozens of lawsuits initiated in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Baker that malapportionment was a justiciable issue. On July 21 1962, the three judge district court unanimously declared Alabama’s system of apportionment a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court increased the representation of underrepresented urban counties, changing Jefferson Country’s delegation from seven to seventeen and Mobile County’s from three to eight (Smith, 2014: 131). Bernard Reynolds, a probate judge in Dallas County, an overwhelmingly white rural county that feared being lumped into a district with Lowndes County and its overwhelming African-American majority, filed an appeal against the district court’s ruling with the US Supreme Court, with the case being heard as Reynolds v Sims (Smith, 2014: 124–137). The eventual 8–1 decision in Reynolds declared ‘one person, one vote’ to be the required standard of apportionment in the United States, based on the principle of numerically equal districts.

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