| Reynolds v. Sims | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Argued November, 1963 Decided June 15, 1964 | |
| Full case name | Reynolds, Judge, et al. v. Sims, et al. |
| Citations | 377U.S.533 (more) 84 S. Ct. 1362; 12L. Ed. 2d 506; 1964U.S. LEXIS 1002 |
| Argument | Oral argument |
| Case history | |
| Prior | Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama |
| Holding | |
| State senate districts must have roughly equal populations based on the principle of "one person, one vote". | |
| Court membership | |
| |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Warren, joined by Black, Douglas, Brennan, White, Goldberg |
| Concurrence | Clark |
| Concurrence | Stewart |
| Dissent | Harlan |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV (Equal Protection Clause) | |
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings | |
| Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 (1946)(in part) | |
Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964), was alandmarkUnited States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that the single-seat electoral districts ofstate legislative chambers must be roughly equal in population. Along withBaker v. Carr (1962) andWesberry v. Sanders (1964), it was part of a series ofWarren Court cases that applied the principle of "one person, one vote" to U.S. legislative bodies.
Prior to the case, numerous state legislative chambers had districts containing unequal populations; for example, in theNevada Senate, the smallest district had 568 people, while the largest had approximately 127,000 people. Some states refused to engage in regularredistricting, while others enshrined county by county representation (like the U.S. constitution does with state by state representation) in their constitutions. The case ofReynolds v. Sims arose after voters inBirmingham, Alabama, challenged the apportionment of theAlabama Legislature; although theConstitution of Alabama provided for both houses to be apportioned on the basis of population (a requirement thatcould not be changed by constitutional amendment),[1] the Alabama Legislature failed to conduct the required periodic redistricting and even proposed a constitutional amendment which - in violation of the constitution's eternity clause - would provide for one state senator per county regardless of population differences.
In a majority opinion joined by five other justices, Chief JusticeEarl Warren ruled that theFourteenth Amendment'sEqual Protection Clause requires states to establish state legislative electoral districts roughly equal in population. Warren held that "legislators represent people, not trees oracres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." In a concurring opinion, Associate JusticeTom Campbell Clark allowed one house to deviate from this standard only as long as the other house complies with it, while in his dissenting opinion, Associate JusticeJohn Marshall Harlan II argued that the Equal Protection Clause was not designed to apply to voting rights. The decision had a major impact on state legislatures, as many states had to change their system of representation.[2]
Beforethe industrialization andurbanization of the United States, a state senate in most states was understood to represent rural counties as a counterbalance to towns and cities. Of the forty-eight states then in the Union, only seven[a] twice redistricted even one chamber of their legislature following both the1930 and the1940 Censuses.[3][4] Illinois did not redistrict between 1910 and 1955,[5] while Alabama and Tennessee had at the time ofReynolds not redistricted since 1901. In Connecticut, Vermont, Mississippi, and Delaware, apportionment was fixed by thestates' constitutions, which, when written in the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, did not foresee the possibility ofrural depopulation as was to occur during the first half of the century.[3] In New Hampshire the state constitutions, since January 1776, had always called for the state senate to be apportioned based on taxes paid, rather than on population.
Having already overturned its ruling that redistricting was a purely political question inBaker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), the Court ruled to correct what it considered egregious examples ofmalapportionment; these were serious enough to undermine the premises underlyingrepublican government. BeforeReynolds, urban counties nationwide often had total representations similar to rural counties, and inFlorida, there was a limit to three representatives even for the most populous counties.[4]
Voters fromJefferson County,Alabama, home to the state's largest city ofBirmingham, challenged the apportionment of theAlabama Legislature. TheAlabama Constitution paradoxically provided that, although senatorial districts have to have as equal a population as possible, counties cannot be split across several senatorial districts. Ratio variances as great as 41 to 1 from one senatorial district to another existed in theAlabama Senate (i.e., the number of eligible voters voting for one senator was in one case 41 times the number of voters in another). The case was named for M. O. Sims, one of the voters who brought the suit, and B. A. Reynolds, a probate judge inDallas County, one of the named defendants in the original suit.[6] Reynolds was named (along with three other probate judges) as a symbolic representative of all probate judges in the state of Alabama.[7]
Among the more extreme pre-Reynolds disparities[8] claimed byMorris K. Udall:
The right to vote freely for the candidate of one's choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government. And the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise. [...] Undoubtedly, the right of suffrage is a fundamental matter in a free and democratic society. Especially since the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights, any alleged infringement of the right of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized.
The eight justices who struck down state senate inequality based their decision on the principle of "one person, one vote." In hismajority decision,Chief JusticeEarl Warren said "Legislators represent people, not trees oracres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests." In addition, the majority simply denied the argument that states were permitted to base their apportionment structures upon the Constitution itself, which requires two senators from each state despite substantially unequal populations among the states.
JusticeTom C. Clark wrote aconcurring opinion. JusticePotter Stewart also issued a concurring opinion, in which he argued that while many of the schemes of representation before the court in the case were egregiously undemocratic and clearly violative of equal protection, it was not for the Court to provide any guideline beyond general reasonableness for apportionment of districts.
Indissent, JusticeJohn Marshall Harlan II wrote that the majority had chosen to ignore the language, history, andoriginal intent of theEqual Protection Clause, which did not extend to voting rights. The dissent strongly accused the Court of repeatedly amending the Constitution through its opinions, rather than waiting for thelawful amendment process: "the Court's action now bringing them (state legislative apportionments) within the purview of the Fourteenth Amendment amounts to nothing less than an exercise of the amending power by this Court." The Court had already extended "one person, one vote" to allU.S. congressional districts inWesberry v. Sanders (1964) a month before, but not to the Senate.
Since the ruling applied different representation rules to the states than was applicable to the federal government,Reynolds v. Sims set off a legislative firestorm across the country. SenatorEverett Dirksen ofIllinois led a fight to pass aconstitutional amendment allowing legislative districts similar to theUnited States Senate.[12] He warned that:
[T]he forces of our national life are not brought to bear on public questions solely in proportion to the weight of numbers. If they were, the 6 million citizens of theChicago area would hold sway in theIllinois Legislature without consideration of the problems of their 4 million fellows who are scattered in 100 other counties. Under the Court's new decree,California could be dominated byLos Angeles andSan Francisco;Michigan byDetroit.
Numerous states had to change their system of representation in the state legislature. For instance,South Carolina had historically elected one state senator from each county. It devised a reapportionment plan and passed an amendment providing forhome rule to counties. While allegations of state senates being redundant arose in the decision's aftermath, all states affected retained their state senates, with state senators being elected fromsingle-member districts. This contrasted with the options of abolishing the upper houses, as had been done inNebraska in 1936[b] (as well asthe provinces of Canada), or electing state senators viaproportional representation from either several largemulti-member districts or from one statewide at-large district, as was done inAustralia.[13]
In a 2015Time Magazine survey of over 50 law professors, bothErwin Chemerinsky (Dean,UC Berkeley School of Law) and Richard Pildes (NYU School of Law) namedReynolds v. Sims the "best Supreme Court decision since 1960", with Chemerinsky noting that in his opinion, the decision made American government "far more democratic and representative."[2]
Among the decisions repeatedly praised by the law-school professors were those that championed civil and individual liberties, as well as those that made democracy more participatory. Decisions that were often mentioned included Loving v. Virginia (1967), which found restrictions on interracial marriage unconstitutional; New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), which protected freedom of the press in the realm of political reporting and libel; Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), which established the one-person, one-vote concept in legislative apportionment; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 same-sex-marriage ruling.