Significance: This ruling established that the Supreme Court had jurisdiction over state reapportionment cases when the reapportionments involved threatened voters’ rights under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision led to a string of lawsuits, which in turn led to the redrawing of legislative districts nationwide.
Background: The Tennessee state constitution required that the state legislative districts be redrawn every 10 years to reapportion members of the state general assembly. Between 1901 and 1959, however, the state did not reapportion the members once. During that time, the population in Tennessee grew significantly, and much of the population shifted from rural to urban areas. In 1959 Charles Baker and many other citizens sued the state’s secretary of state, Joseph Cordell Carr, and its attorney general, George McCanless, claiming that this failure to reapportion the members denied city voters their fair share of seats in the general assembly. The Tennessee court, however, refused to require that the seats be reapportioned. The plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court. The questions that the Supreme Court had to answer were whether it had jurisdiction over this matter and whether the issues dealt with in this case involved the Constitution.
Decision: This case was argued on April 19­20, 1961; reargued on October 9, 1961; and decided on March 26, 1962, by a vote of 7 to 2. Justice William Brennan Jr. spoke for the Court, with Justices Potter Stewart and Tom Clark concurring, Justices Felix Frankfurter and John Harlan in dissent, and Justice Charles Evans Whittaker not participating. The Court ruled that this case fell within the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Any state legislature whose apportionment did not reflect the distribution of its population was in danger of violating citizens’ rights under the equal protection clause.
