Reynolds v. Sims
| Reynolds v. Sims | |
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| Argued November, 1963 Decided June 15, 1964 |
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| Full case name | Reynolds, Judge, et al. v. Sims, et al. |
| Citations | 377 U.S. 533 (more)
84 S. Ct. 1362; 12 L. Ed. 2d 506; 1964 U.S. LEXIS 1002
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| Prior history | Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama |
| Holding | |
| The Court struck down state senate inequality, basing their decision 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 | |
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This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
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| Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 (1946) | |
Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964) was a United States Supreme Court case that ruled that unlike the United States Senate, both chambers of state legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population. The case was brought on behalf of voters in Alabama by M.O. Sims, a taxpayer in Birmingham, Alabama, but affected both northern and southern states that had similarly failed to reapportion their legislatures in keeping with changes in state population after its application in five companion cases in Colorado, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware.
Since the industrialization and urbanization of the United States from the Gilded Age onwards, state and national legislatures had become increasingly reluctant to redistrict. This reluctance developed because there existed general upper-class fear that if redistricting to meet population changes were carried out, voters in large, expanding or expanded urban areas would vote for confiscatory wealth redistribution that would severely inhibit the power of business interests who controlled state and city governments early in the century. Of the forty-eight states then in the Union, only seven twice redistricted even one chamber of their legislature following both the 1930 and the 1940 Censuses. Oregon did not redistrict between 1907 and 1960, Illinois not between 1910 and 1955, whilst Alabama and Tennessee had at the time of Reynolds not redistricted since 1901. In Connecticut, Vermont, Mississippi and Delaware, apportionment was fixed by the states’ constitutions, which when written in the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries could not possibly have imagined the possibility of rural depopulation as was to occur during the first half of the century.
Having already overturned its ruling that redistricting was a purely political question in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), the Court ruled to correct what it considered egregious examples of malapportionment; these were serious enough to undermine the premises underlying republican government. Before Reynolds, urban counties nationwide often had total representations similar to rural counties, and in Florida, there was a limit to three representatives even for the most populous counties.
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