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‘HISTORIC’, ‘MOMENTOUS’ AND ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ ARE ONLY A FEW OF the epithets freely bestowed upon the case of Baker v. Carr. By that justly celebrated judgment of 26 March 1962 the US Supreme Court implied for the first time that the weight of an American's vote might no longer depend on whereabouts in the country he lived. It did so by ruling that a scheme of apportionment which permitted inequalities of population between electoral districts represented in a state's legislature could be challenged in federal (not merely state) courts, which had competence to protect the right in question. The tide of ensuing litigation attained a new level on I7 February 1964, when the Court in Wesberry v. Sanders held that a like symmetry must prevail among US Congressional districts also. High-water mark was reached on 15 June of that year with Reynolds v. Sims, where the constitution was held to require
that the seats of both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis. Simply stated, an individual's right to vote for state legislators is unconstitutionally impaired when its weight is in a substantial fashion diluted when compared with votes of citizens living in other parts of the State.
1 369 U.S.186 (1962). Apportionment, strictly speaking, is the allocation of respective representational strengths in the legislature among a state’s constituent divisions, these having previously been determined by districting. But the former term will here be used (as commonly it is) to cover both processes. American legislative districts vary in size and configuration from part of a populous city to several counties combined.
2 376 U.S.1 (1964).
3 377 U.S.533 (1964), the ‘pattern-setter’ of eight such suits decided the same day.
4 National Municipal League: Compendium on Legislative Apportionment, 2nd edit. (N.Y., 1962); Bureau of the Census: Congressional District Data Book, Districts of the 87th Congress (U.S. Department of Commerce, Wash., D.C., 1961). As for the US House of Representatives, ‘of the 42 states with more than one Congressional district after the 1960 census, half contained constituencies where the vote of a citizen in the smallest … was worth at least twice that of a citizen in the largest’ (A. Hacker: Congressional Districting (Wash., D.C., 1963), pp. 2–3).
5 16 June 1964, editorial.
6 Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 (1946). Judicial self-restraint had since 1849 been exercised in ‘political’ matters on the three grounds that courts should not intervene in areas which, either by their nature or by constitutional language, are peculiarly committed to the co-ordinate branches of executive or legislature; or in which ‘standards meet for political judgement’ cannot be framed; or in which the ‘framework or political character’ of government (whether state or national) is called in question. Because the defendant in Baker was not a co-ordinate branch of government, but a state, the first ground was held to be no bar to proceedings. No disclaimer by the Baker court, however, suffices to disguise its trespass on the third ground, or the extent to which the ‘political’ embargo has thereby been breached.
7 E.g., for the reformers, A. Hacker: op. cit; Jewell, Malcolm E. (ed.), The Polities of Reapportionment, New York, 1962 Google Scholar; and Lamb, Karl A. et al., Apportionment and Representative Institutions, Washington, D.C., 1963 Google Scholar. For the opposition, De Grazia, Alfred, Apportionment and Representative Government, New York, 1963 Google Scholar. A good conspectus of the pre-Baker situation is provided by a symposium in Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 17, 1952; of post-Baker developments by McKay, Robert B., Reapportionment, the Law and Politics of Equal Representation, New York, 1965 Google Scholar. See also a recent symposium on Reapportioning Legislatures (ed. Howard D. Hamilton, Columbus, Ohio, 1966), and an anthology on Reapportionment (ed. Glendon Schubert, New York, 1965).
8 E.g. Hammersmith Borough Council v. Boundary Commission for England and Harper and Another v. Secretary Of State fm the Home Department; see The Times for 15, 18 and 21 December 1964. The British system of electoral districting is cited occasionally when Congress considers a redistricting bill (see, e.g., Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3 of H. of R. Committee on the Judiciary. 87th Cong., Ist sess. (1961) Series 9, at p. 34), and was invoked at some length by Mr Justice Frankfurter in his Baker dissent.
9 Geissübler v. Fribourg, Grand Conseil, Tribunal Fédéral, March 1962, 110 J. des Tribunaux I, 271 (Swit.) For further particulars see Fribourg’s leading newspaper La Liberté during those months.
10 BVerfG Beschluss 2 BvC 3/62. (22 May 1963): for particulars see Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 1963, p. 1600; Die Oeffentliche Verwaltung 1963, p. 579; and Deutsches Verwaltungsblatt 1964, p. 47. A good general review of West Germany’s electoral laws is Seifert, Bundeswahlgesetz. Kommentar, 2nd edit., Vahlen, Berlin & Frankfurt, 1965; and a useful select bibliography is Bibliography No. 8 (1967) of the Wissenschaftlichen Abteilung des Deutschen Bundestags, entitled Wablsystem und Wahlrecht des Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
11 Polanyi, M., The Logic of Liberty, 1951, p. 184 Google Scholar.
12 Peltason, Jack W., in his Fifty-eight Lonely Men, New York, 1961 Google Scholar, has illuminated the plight of US federal district justices in the Southern states, caught between professional conscience and the social values of their environment.
13 For a detailed account of these Congressional activities, see Hanson, Royce, The Political Thicket, New Jersey, 1966 Google Scholar, Ch. 5.
14 369 U.S. 186 (1962) at 268, 339; 377 U.S. 833 (1964) at 624–5.
15 369 U.S. 186, at 270 and 186; 341 U.S. 494 (1951).