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Traditional Districting Principles: Judicial Myths vs. Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Micah Altman
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One person, one vote. With this principle, the Court permanently changed representation in the United States. Equal population requirements changed the face of legislative redistricting in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court applied it to congressional districts in Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964), and to state legislatures in Reynolds v. Sims, 84 S. Ct. 1362 (1964). Equality in district population was valued not only as instrumental to other goals but also for itself, as Justice Black explained in Wesberry: “As nearly as practicable one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s. . . . To say that a vote is worth more in one district than another would . . . run counter to our fundamental ideas of democratic government.”

As Justice Brennan made clear, the Court based its decision in large part on a particular understanding of the historical meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and of article 1, section 2, of the Constitution. And as widely accepted as this principle has come to be, it has been subject to severe historical criticism, criticism that has never been resolved. For example, Berger (1977) claims that malapportionment was historically present and accepted before and during the creation of the Fourteenth Amendment and hence that the equal protection clause could not have implied the equal population principle (from chapter 5): “Certainly there was no disclosure that such intrusion [on apportionment] was contemplated; there is in fact striking evidence that malapportionment was an accepted practice.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 1998 , pp. 159 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998 

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Footnotes

Micah Altman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, and a research fellow in the Harvard-MIT Data Center at Harvard University. He would like to thank Morgan Kousser for his guidance during the development of this article. An earlier version of this article was delivered at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association in Chicago, November 1995.

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