In Baker v. Carr, the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 that malapportioned state legislative districts presented a justiciable question under the Equal Protection Clause, rejecting decades of precedent that treated redistricting as a nonjusticiable 'political question.' The decision paved the way for the 'one person, one vote' principle and a wave of court-ordered reapportionment across the United States.
For decades, rural-dominated state legislatures across America had refused to redraw district lines despite massive population shifts to cities and suburbs, leaving some rural votes worth many times more than urban ones. Tennessee, for instance, hadn't redrawn its legislative districts since 1901, even as Memphis and Nashville swelled with residents who found themselves grossly underrepresented in the state capital.
Charles Baker, a Republican official from Shelby County, sued Joe Carr, Tennessee's secretary of state, arguing the outdated districts violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. Lower courts dismissed the case, citing the Supreme Court's own 1946 precedent in Colegrove v. Green, which had declared such reapportionment disputes a 'political thicket' courts should avoid.
Justice William Brennan's majority opinion changed that, holding that federal courts did have jurisdiction to hear equal protection claims about redistricting. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote a furious dissent warning the Court was wading into a political minefield, but the ruling opened the floodgates. Within two years, the Court's Reynolds v. Sims decision established the 'one person, one vote' standard, forcing nationwide reapportionment that dramatically shifted political power from rural areas to cities and suburbs — arguably one of the most consequential rulings of the twentieth century in reshaping American representative government.