Peter Woll Constitutional Law Case Notes

One main goal of the Progressive movement, which lasted from the late 1890s until World War I, was to ameliorate the worst aspects of industrialization -- fouling of the environment, abuse of workers, exploitation of consumers and corruption of the political process. Starting in the state legislatures, reformers passed a variety of statutes, including factory safety laws, workmen's compensation, minimum wages and maximum hours.

But conservatives were able to block some of these programs in the courts, where they appealed to a judiciary imbued with the notions that private property was sacrosanct and that legislatures should not be able to tell people how to use their property. Courts also sustained the notion of "liberty to contract," claiming that employers and employees should be able to negotiate without state interference. The courts did acknowledge that the state had an inherent police power, by which it could interfere with property and labor contracts in order to protect the health and safety of citizens.

But in the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York, a bare majority of the Supreme Court had ruled that a law limiting bakery workers to a ten-hour day was unconstitutional, because such a measure bore no relation to the workers' health or safety. The Court conceded, however, that such measures might be permissible if it could be shown that the law did in fact serve to protect health or safety.

When the state of Oregon established a ten-hour workday for women in laundries and factories, business owners attacked it on the grounds that, like the New York law, it bore no relation to the women's health or safety. To defend the law, Oregon turned to the noted Boston attorney Louis D. Brandeis, who had already won a reputation for defending the public interest. Brandeis seized upon the opening in Lochner, namely, that if he could show how the Oregon law related to worker health and safety, then the Court would have to sustain it. He de-vised a highly unusual brief. He covered the traditional legal precedents in just two pages, and then filled over 100 pages with sociological, economic and physiological data on the effect of long working hours on the health of women.

Justice Brewer's opinion not only acknowledged the brief, a highly unusual step, but conceded that women were in fact different from men, and thus needed this type of factory protection. Brandeis's strategy had worked, but it was a strategy for the times; he himself did not consider women inferior or subservient to men.

The most important result of the Brandeis brief and of the decision in this case is that it set the model for all future reformers attempting to use the law to affect social and political conditions. Muller democratized the law, in that it made it more open to the everyday facts of life; it called upon justices to take into account the effect of their decisions on the real world and on the lives of real people.

For further reading: Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (1984); Alpheus T. Mason, "The Case of the Overworked Laundress," in Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution (1975).

MULLER V. OREGON (1908)

We held in Lochner v. New York (1905) that a law providing that no laborer shall be required or permitted to work in a bakery more than sixty hours in a week or ten hours in a day was not as to men a legitimate exercise of the police power of the State, but an unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract in relation to his labor, and as such was in conflict with, and void under, the Federal Constitution. That decision is invoked by plaintiff in error as decisive of the question before us. But this assumes that the difference between the sexes does not justify a different rule respecting a restriction of the hours of labor.

In patent cases counsel are apt to open the argument with a discussion of the state of the art. It may not be amiss, in the present case, before examining the constitutional question, to notice the course of legislation as well as expressions of opinion from other than judicial sources. In the brief filed by Mr. Louis D. Brandeis, for the defendant in error, is a very copious collection of all these matters...

The legislation and opinions referred to... may not be, technically speaking, authorities, and in them is little or no discussion of the constitutional question presented to us for determination, yet they are significant of a widespread belief that woman's physical structure, and the functions she performs in consequence thereof, justify special legislation restricting or qualifying the conditions under which she should be permitted to toil. Constitutional questions, it is true, are not settled by even a consensus of present public opinion, for it is the peculiar value of a written constitution that it places in unchanging form limitations upon legislative action, and thus gives a permanence and stability to popular government which otherwise would be lacking. At the same time, when a question of fact is debated and debatable, and the extent to which a special constitutional limitation goes is affected by the truth in respect to that fact, a widespread and long continued belief concerning it is worthy of consideration. We take judicial cognizance of all matters of general knowledge.

It is undoubtedly true, as more than once declared by this court, that the general right to contract in relation to one's business is part of the liberty of the individual, protected by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution; yet it is equally well settled that this liberty is not absolute and extending to all contracts, and that a State may, without conflicting with the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, restrict in many respects the individual's power of contract...

That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious. This is especially true when the burdens of motherhood are upon her. Even when they are not, by abundant testimony of the medical fraternity continuance for a long time on her feet at work, repeating this from day to day, tends to injurious effects upon the body, and as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race...

The two sexes differ in structure of body, in the functions to be performed by each, in the amount of physical strength, in the capacity for long-continued labor, particularly when done standing, the influence of vigorous health upon the future well-being of the race, the self-reliance which enables one to assert full rights, and in the capacity to maintain the struggle for subsistence. This difference justifies a difference in legislation and upholds that which is designed to compensate for some of the burdens which rest upon her...

For these reasons, and without questioning in any respect the decision in Lochner v. New York, we are of the opinion that it cannot be adjudged that the act in question is in conflict with the Federal Constitution, so far as it respects the work of a female in a laundry.

UNITED STATES v. CAROLENE PRODUCTS CO., 304 U.S. 144 (1938)

[Footnote 4] There may be narrower scope for operation of the presumption of constitutionality when legislation appears on its face to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitution, such as those of the first ten Amendments, which are deemed equally specific when held to be embraced within the Fourteenth. See Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359, 369 , 370 S., 51 S.Ct. 532, 535, 536, 73 A.L.R. 1484; Lovell v. Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 , 58 S.Ct. 666, decided March 28, 1938.

It is unnecessary to consider now whether legislation which restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation, is to be subjected to more exacting judicial scrutiny under the general prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment than are most other types of legislation. On restrictions upon the right to vote, see Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536 , 47 S.Ct. 446; Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 , 52 S.Ct. 484, 88 A.L. R. 458; on restraints upon the dissemination of information, see Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 , 713-714, 718-720, 722, 51 S.Ct. 625, 630, 632, 633; Grosjean v. American Press Co., 297 U.S. 233 , 56 S.Ct. 444; Lovell v. Griffin, supra; on interferences with political organizations, see Stromberg v. California, supra, 283 U.S. 359, 369 , 51 S.Ct. 532, 535, 73 A.L.R. 1484; Fiske v. Kansas, 274 U.S. 380 , 47 S.Ct. 655;

Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 , 373-378, 47 S.Ct. 641, 647, 649; Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U.S. 242 , 57 S.Ct. 732; and see Holmes, J., in Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652, 673 , 45 S.Ct. 625; as to prohibition of peaceable assembly, see De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 365 , 57 S.Ct. 255, 260.

Nor need we enquire whether similar considerations enter into the review of statutes directed at particular religious, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 , 45 S.Ct. 571, 39 A.L.R. 468, or national, Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 , 43 S.Ct. 625, 29 A.L.R. 1446; Bartels v. Iowa, 262 U.S. 404 , 43 S.Ct. 628; Farrington v. Tokushige, 273 U.S. 284 , 47 S.Ct. 406, or racial minorities. Nixon v. Herndon, supra; Nixon v. Condon, supra; whether prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry. Compare McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 428; South Carolina State Highway Department v. Barnwell Bros., 303 U.S. 177 , 58 S.Ct. 510, decided February 14, 1938, note 2, and cases cited.

In reviewing congressional legislation under the Commerce Clause, we defer to what is often a merely implicit congressional judgment that its regulation addresses a subject substantially affecting interstate commerce "if there is any rational basis for such a finding." ... If that congressional determination is within the realm of reason, "the only remaining question for judicial inquiry is whether `the means chosen by Congress [are] reasonably adapted to the end permitted by the Constitution.' ...

The practice of deferring to rationally based legislative judgments "is a paradigm of judicial restraint." ... In judicial review under the Commerce Clause, it reflects our respect for the institutional competence of the Congress on a subject expressly assigned to it by the Constitution and our appreciation of the legitimacy that comes from Congress's political accountability in dealing with matters open to a wide range of possible choices ...

It was not ever thus, however, as even a brief overview of Commerce Clause history during the past century reminds us. The modern respect for the competence and primacy of Congress in matters affecting commerce developed only after one of this Court's most chastening experiences, when it perforce repudiated an earlier and untenably expansive conception of judicial review in derogation of congressional commerce power. A look at history's sequence will serve to show how today's decision tugs the Court off course, leading it to suggest opportunities for further developments that would be at odds with the rule of restraint to which the Court still wisely states adherence.

Notwithstanding the Court's recognition of a broad commerce power in Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 196-197 (1824) (Marshall, C. J.), Congress saw few occasions to exercise that power prior to Reconstruction, see generally 2 C. Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History 729-739 (rev. ed. 1935), and it was really the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 that opened a new age of congressional reliance on the Commerce Clause for authority to exercise general police powers at the national level, see id., at 729-730. Although the Court upheld a fair amount of the ensuing legislation as being within the commerce power, see, e.g., Stafford v. Wallace, 258 U.S. 495 (1922) (upholding an Act regulating trade practices in the meat packing industry); The Shreveport Rate Cases, 234 U.S. 342 (1914) (upholding ICC order to equalize inter- and intrastate rail rates); see generally Warren, supra, at 729-739, the period from the turn of the century to 1937 is better noted for a series of cases applying highly formalistic notions of "commerce" to invalidate federal social and economic legislation, see, e.g., Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 298 U.S. 238, 303-304 (1936) (striking Act prohibiting unfair labor practices in coal industry as regulation of "mining" and "production," not "commerce"); A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 545-548 (1935) (striking congressional regulation of activities affecting interstate commerce only "indirectly"); Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918) (striking Act prohibiting shipment in interstate commerce of goods manufactured at factories using child labor because the Act regulated "manufacturing," not "commerce"); Adair v. United States, 208 U.S. 161 (1908) (striking protection of labor union membership as outside "commerce").

These restrictive views of commerce subject to congressional power complemented the Court's activism in limiting the enforceable scope of state economic regulation. It is most familiar history that during this same period the Court routinely invalidated state social and economic legislation under an expansive conception of Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process. See, e.g., Louis K. Liggett Co. v. Baldridge, 278 U.S. 105 (1928) (striking state law requiring pharmacy owners to be licensed as pharmacists); Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915) (striking state law prohibiting employers from requiring their employees to agree not to join labor organizations); Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905) (striking state law establishing maximum working hours for bakers). See generally L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law 568-574 (2d ed. 1988). The fulcrums of judicial review in these cases were the notions of liberty and property characteristic of laissez-faire economics, whereas the Commerce Clause cases turned on what was ostensibly a structural limit of federal power, but under each conception of judicial review the Court's character for the first third of the century showed itself in exacting judicial scrutiny of a legislature's choice of economic ends and of the legislative means selected to reach them.

It was not merely coincidental, then, that sea changes in the Court's conceptions of its authority under the Due Process and Commerce Clauses occurred virtually together, in 1937, with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 and NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 . See Stern, The Commerce Clause and the National Economy, 1933-1946, 59 Harv. L. Rev. 645, 674-682 (1946). In West Coast Hotel, the Court's rejection of a due process challenge to a state law fixing minimum wages for women and children marked the abandonment of its expansive protection of contractual freedom. Two weeks later, Jones & Laughlin affirmed congressional commerce power to authorize NLRB injunctions against unfair labor practices. The Court's finding that the regulated activity had a direct enough effect on commerce has since been seen as beginning the abandonment, for practical purposes, of the formalistic distinction between direct and indirect effects.

In the years following these decisions, deference to legislative policy judgments on commercial regulation became the powerful theme under both the Due Process and Commerce Clauses, see United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S., at 147 -148, 152; United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100, 119 -121 (1941); United States v. Wrightwood Dairy Co., 315 U.S. 110, 118 -119 (1942), and in due course that deference became articulate in the standard of rationality review. In due process litigation, the Court's statement of a rational basis test came quickly. See United States v. Carolene Products Co., supra, at 152; see also Williamson v. Lee Optical Co., 348 U.S., at 489 -490. The parallel formulation of the Commerce Clause test came later, only because complete elimination of the direct/indirect effects dichotomy and acceptance of the cumulative effects doctrine, Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 125 , 127-129 (1942); United States v. Wrightwood Dairy Co., supra, at 124-126, so far settled the pressing issues of congressional power over commerce as to leave the Court for years without any need to phrase a test explicitly deferring to rational legislative judgments.

The moment came, however, with the challenge to congressional Commerce Clause authority to prohibit racial discrimination in places of public accommodation, when the Court simply made explicit what the earlier cases had implied: "where we find that the legislators, in light of the facts and testimony before them, have a rational basis for finding a chosen regulatory scheme necessary to the protection of commerce, our investigation is at an end." Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294, 303 -304 (1964), discussing United States v. Darby, supra; see Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241, 258 -259 (1964). Thus, under commerce, as under due process, adoption of rational basis review expressed the recognition that the Court had no sustainable basis for subjecting economic regulation as such to judicial policy judgments, and for the past half-century the Court has no more turned back in the direction of formalistic Commerce Clause review (as in deciding whether regulation of commerce was sufficiently direct) than it has inclined toward reasserting the substantive authority of Lochner due process (as in the inflated protection of contractual autonomy). See, e.g., Maryland v. Wirtz, 392 U.S., at 190 , 198; Perez v. United States, 402 U.S. 146, 151 -157 (1971); Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Assn., Inc., 452 U.S., at 276 , 277.

There is today, however, a backward glance at both the old pitfalls, as the Court treats deference under the rationality rule as subject to gradation according to the commercial or noncommercial nature of the immediate subject of the challenged regulation. See ante, at 10-13. The distinction between what is patently commercial and what is not looks much like the old distinction between what directly affects commerce and what touches it only indirectly. And the act of calibrating the level of deference by drawing a line between what is patently commercial and what is less purely so will probably resemble the process of deciding how much interference with contractual freedom was fatal. Thus, it seems fair to ask whether the step taken by the Court today does anything but portend a return to the untenable jurisprudence from which the Court extricated itself almost 60 years ago. The answer is not reassuring. To be sure, the occasion for today's decision reflects the century's end, not its beginning. But if it seems anomalous that the Congress of the United States has taken to regulating school yards, the act in question is still probably no more remarkable than state regulation of bake shops 90 years ago. In any event, there is no reason to hope that the Court's qualification of rational basis review will be any more successful than the efforts at substantive economic review made by our predecessors as the century began. Taking the Court's opinion on its own terms, JUSTICE BREYER has explained both the hopeless porosity of "commercial" character as a ground of Commerce Clause distinction in America's highly connected economy, and the inconsistency of this categorization with our rational basis precedents from the last 50 years.

Further glosses on rationality review, moreover, may be in the offing. Although this case turns on commercial character, the Court gestures toward two other considerations that it might sometime entertain in applying rational basis scrutiny (apart from a statutory obligation to supply independent proof of a jurisdictional element): does the congressional statute deal with subjects of traditional state regulation, and does the statute contain explicit factual findings supporting the otherwise implicit determination that the regulated activity substantially affects interstate commerce? Once again, any appeal these considerations may have depends on ignoring the painful lesson learned in 1937, for neither of the Court's suggestions would square with rational basis scrutiny.

The Court observes that the Gun-Free School Zones Act operates in two areas traditionally subject to legislation by the States, education and enforcement of criminal law. The suggestion is either that a connection between commerce and these subjects is remote, or that the commerce power is simply weaker when it touches subjects on which the States have historically been the primary legislators. Neither suggestion is tenable. As for remoteness, it may or may not be wise for the National Government to deal with education, but JUSTICE BREYER has surely demonstrated that the commercial prospects of an illiterate State or Nation are not rosy, and no argument should be needed to show that hijacking interstate shipments of cigarettes can affect commerce substantially, even though the States have traditionally prosecuted robbery. And as for the notion that the commerce power diminishes the closer it gets to customary state concerns, that idea has been flatly rejected, and not long ago. The commerce power, we have often observed, is plenary. Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Assn., Inc., 312 U.S., at 276 ; United States v. Darby, supra, at 114; see Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528, 549 -550 (1985); Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat., at 196-197. Justice Harlan put it this way in speaking for the Court in Maryland v. Wirtz:

See also United States v. Darby, supra, at 114; Gregory v. Ashcroft, 501 U.S. 452, 460 (1991); United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S., at 147 . ...

The question for the courts, as all agree, is not whether as a predicate to legislation Congress in fact found that a particular activity substantially affects interstate commerce. The legislation implies such a finding, and there is no reason to entertain claims that Congress acted ultra vires intentionally. Nor is the question whether Congress was correct in so finding. The only question is whether the legislative judgment is within the realm of reason. ...

Congressional findings do not, however, directly address the question of reasonableness; they tell us what Congress actually has found, not what it could rationally find. If, indeed, the Court were to make the existence of explicit congressional findings dispositive in some close or difficult cases something other than rationality review would be afoot. The resulting congressional obligation to justify its policy choices on the merits would imply either a judicial authority to review the justification (and, hence, the wisdom) of those choices, or authority to require Congress to act with some high degree of deliberateness, of which express findings would be evidence. But review for congressional wisdom would just be the old judicial pretension discredited and abandoned in 1937, and review for deliberateness would be as patently unconstitutional as an Act of Congress mandating long opinions from this Court. Such a legislative process requirement would function merely as an excuse for covert review of the merits of legislation under standards never expressed and more or less arbitrarily applied. Under such a regime, in any case, the rationality standard of review would be a thing of the past.

On the other hand, to say that courts applying the rationality standard may not defer to findings is not, of course, to say that findings are pointless. They may, in fact, have great value in telling courts what to look for, in establishing at least one frame of reference for review, and in citing to factual authority. ... Congressional findings on a more particular plane than this record illustrates would accordingly have earned judicial thanks. But thanks do not carry the day as long as rational possibility is the touchstone, and I would not allow for the possibility, as the Court's opinion may, that the addition of congressional findings could in principle have affected the fate of the statute here.

III

Because JUSTICE BREYER'S opinion demonstrates beyond any doubt that the Act in question passes the rationality review that the Court continues to espouse, today's decision may be seen as only a misstep, its reasoning and its suggestions not quite in gear with the prevailing standard, but hardly an epochal case. I would not argue otherwise, but I would raise a caveat. Not every epochal case has come in epochal trappings. Jones & Laughlin did not reject the direct-indirect standard in so many words; it just said the relation of the regulated subject matter to commerce was direct enough. 301 U.S., at 41 -43. But we know what happened.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

UNITED STATES v. MORRISON et al.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 99—5. Argued January 11, 2000–Decided May 15, 2000¹

Click here for links to all the opinions in the Morrison case

Petitioner Brzonkala filed suit, alleging, inter alia, that she was raped by respondents while the three were students at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and that this attack violated 42 U.S.C. § 13981 which provides a federal civil remedy for the victims of gender-motivated violence. Respondents moved to dismiss on the grounds that the complaint failed to state a claim and that §13981’s civil remedy is unconstitutional. Petitioner United States intervened to defend the section’s constitutionality. In dismissing the complaint, the District Court held that it stated a claim against respondents, but that Congress lacked authority to enact §13981 under either §8 of the Commerce Clause or §5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which Congress had explicitly identified as the sources of federal authority for §13981. The en banc Fourth Circuit affirmed.

Held: Section 13981 cannot be sustained under the Commerce Clause or §5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pp. 7—28.

(a) The Commerce Clause does not provide Congress with authority to enact §13981’s federal civil remedy. A congressional enactment will be invalidated only upon a plain showing that Congress has exceeded its constitutional bounds. See United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 568, 577—578. Petitioners assert that §13981 can be sustained under Congress’ commerce power as a regulation of activity that substantially affects interstate commerce. The proper framework for analyzing such a claim is provided by the principles the Court set out in Lopez. First, in Lopez, the noneconomic, criminal nature of possessing a firearm in a school zone was central to the Court’s conclusion that Congress lacks authority to regulate such possession. Similarly, gender-motivated crimes of violence are not, in any sense, economic activity. Second, like the statute at issue in Lopez, §13981 contains no jurisdictional element establishing that the federal cause of action is in pursuance of Congress’ regulation of interstate commerce. Although Lopez makes clear that such a jurisdictional element would lend support to the argument that §13981 is sufficiently tied to interstate commerce to come within Congress’ authority, Congress elected to cast §13981’s remedy over a wider, and more purely intrastate, body of violent crime. Third, although §13981, unlike the Lopez statute, is supported by numerous findings regarding the serious impact of gender-motivated violence on victims and their families, these findings are substantially weakened by the fact that they rely on reasoning that this Court has rejected, namely a but-for causal chain from the initial occurrence of violent crime to every attenuated effect upon interstate commerce. If accepted, this reasoning would allow Congress to regulate any crime whose nationwide, aggregated impact has substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption. Moreover, such reasoning will not limit Congress to regulating violence, but may be applied equally as well to family law and other areas of state regulation since the aggregate effect of marriage, divorce, and childrearing on the national economy is undoubtedly significant. The Constitution requires a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local, and there is no better example of the police power, which the Founders undeniably left reposed in the States and denied the central government, than the suppression of violent crime and vindication of its victims. Congress therefore may not regulate noneconomic, violent criminal conduct based solely on the conduct’s aggregate effect on interstate commerce. Pp. 7—19.

(b) Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which permits Congress to enforce by appropriate legislation the constitutional guarantee that no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process or deny any person equal protection of the laws, City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 517, also does not give Congress the authority to enact §13981. Petitioners’ assertion that there is pervasive bias in various state justice systems against victims of gender-motivated violence is supported by a voluminous congressional record. However, the Fourteenth Amendment places limitations on the manner in which Congress may attack discriminatory conduct. Foremost among them is the principle that the Amendment prohibits only state action, not private conduct. This was the conclusion reached in United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629, and the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, which were both decided shortly after the Amendment’s adoption. The force of the doctrine of stare decisis behind these decisions stems not only from the length of time they have been on the books, but also from the insight attributable to the Members of the Court at that time, who all had intimate knowledge and familiarity with the events surrounding the Amendment’s adoption. Neither United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, nor District of Columbia v. Carter, 409 U.S. 418, casts any doubt on the enduring vitality of the Civil Rights Cases and Harris. Assuming that there has been gender-based disparate treatment by state authorities in this case, it would not be enough to save §13981’s civil remedy, which is directed not at a State or state actor but at individuals who have committed criminal acts motivated by gender bias. Section 13981 visits no consequence on any Virginia public official involved in investigating or prosecuting Brzonkala’s assault, and it is thus unlike any of the §5 remedies this Court has previously upheld. See e.g., South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301. Section 13981 is also different from previously upheld remedies in that it applies uniformly throughout the Nation, even though Congress’ findings indicate that the problem addressed does not exist in all, or even most, States. In contrast, the §5 remedy in Katzenbach was directed only to those States in which Congress found that there had been discrimination. Pp. 19—27.

169 F.3d 820, affirmed.

Rehnquist, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed a concurring opinion. Souter, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Breyer, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Stevens, J., joined, and in which Souter and Ginsburg, JJ., joined as to Part I—A.

Eight Amendment Jurisprudence

As the cases below reveal the common law incorporated protections against cruel and unusual punishment, therefore the 8th amendment is redundant (why it is in the Bill of Rights I do not know). Since due process historically incorporates the substance (but not the text) of the 8th amendment the 14th amendment of course does also through its due process clause.

Now there is a question of whether or not definitions of cruel and unusual under the 8th amendment in federal jurisdiction differ from due process definitions. Frankfurter in the Resweber case below was careful to note that while due process incorporates protections against cruel and unusual punishment the 14th amendment due process DOES NOT incorporate the 8th amendment. Frankfurter opposed incorporation of the Bill of Rights under the 14th Amendment.

STATE OF LA. EX REL. FRANCIS v. RESWEBER, 329 U.S. 459 (1947)

Mr. Justice REED announced the judgment of the Court in an opinion in which The CHIEF JUSTICE, Mr. Justice BLACK and Mr. Justice JACKSON join.

... Prohibition against the wanton infliction of pain has come into our law from the Bill of Rights of 1688. The identical words appear in our Eighth Amendment. The Fourteenth would prohibit by its due process clause execution by a state in a cruel manner...

When four members of the Court find that a State has denied to a person the due process which the Fourteenth Amendment safeguards, it seems to me important to be explicit regarding the criteria by which the State's duty of obedience to the Constitution must be judged. Particularly is this so when life is at stake....

In an impressive body of decisions this Court has decided that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment expresses a demand for civilized standards which are not defined by the specifically enumerated guarantees of the Bill of Rights. They neither contain the particularities of the first eight amendments nor are they confined to them....

FORD v. WAINWRIGHT, 477 U.S. 399 (1986)

For centuries no jurisdiction has countenanced the execution of the insane, yet this Court has never decided whether the Constitution forbids the practice. Today we keep faith with our common-law heritage in holding that it does....

Since this Court last had occasion to consider the infliction of the death penalty upon the insane, our interpretations of the Due Process Clause and the Eighth Amendment have evolved substantially. In Solesbee v. Balkcom, 339 U.S. 9 (1950), a condemned prisoner claimed a due process right to a judicial determination of his sanity, yet the Court did not consider the possible existence of a right under the Eighth Amendment, which had not yet been applied to the States...

There is now little room for doubt that the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment [which applies to the states through the due process clause of the 14th amendment] embraces, at a minimum, those modes or acts of punishment that had been considered cruel and unusual at the time that the Bill of Rights was adopted....

The Eighth Amendment prohibits the State from inflicting the penalty of death upon a prisoner who is insane....

I join Parts I and II of the Court's opinion. As JUSTICE MARSHALL ably demonstrates, execution of the insane was barred at common law [due process] precisely because it was considered cruel and unusual.

Baker v. Carr (1962), Frankfurter dissent on Political Question doctrine

Baker v. Carr (1962)

Views on the Political Question Doctrine

MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER, whom MR. JUSTICE HARLAN joins, dissenting.

The Court today reverses a uniform course of decision established by a dozen cases, including one by which the very claim now sustained was unanimously rejected [369 U.S. 186, 267] only five years ago. The impressive body of rulings thus cast aside reflected the equally uniform course of our political history regarding the relationship between population and legislative representation - a wholly different matter from denial of the franchise to individuals because of race, color, religion or sex. Such a massive repudiation of the experience of our whole past in asserting destructively novel judicial power demands a detailed analysis of the role of this Court in our constitutional scheme. Disregard of inherent limits in the effective exercise of the Court's "judicial Power" not only presages the futility of judicial intervention in the essentially political conflict of forces by which the relation between population and representation has time out of mind been and now is determined. It may well impair the Court's position as the ultimate organ of "the supreme Law of the Land" in that vast range of legal problems, often strongly entangled in popular feeling, on which this Court must pronounce. The Court's authority - possessed of neither the purse nor the sword - ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction. Such feeling must be nourished by the Court's complete detachment, in fact and in appearance, from political entanglements and by abstention from injecting itself into the clash of political forces in political settlements.

A hypothetical claim resting on abstract assumptions is now for the first time made the basis for affording illusory relief for a particular evil even though it foreshadows deeper and more pervasive difficulties in consequence. The claim is hypothetical and the assumptions are abstract because the Court does not vouchsafe the lower courts - state and federal - guidelines for formulating specific, definite, wholly unprecedented remedies for the inevitable litigations that today's umbrageous disposition is bound to stimulate in connection with politically motivated reapportionments in so many States. In [369 U.S. 186, 268] such a setting, to promulgate jurisdiction in the abstract is meaningless. It is as devoid of reality as "a brooding omnipresence in the sky," for it conveys no intimation what relief, if any, a District Court is capable of affording that would not invite legislatures to play ducks and drakes with the judiciary. For this Court to direct the District Court to enforce a claim to which the Court has over the years consistently found itself required to deny legal enforcement and at the same time to find it necessary to withhold any guidance to the lower court how to enforce this turnabout, new legal claim, manifests an odd - indeed an esoteric - conception of judicial propriety. One of the Court's supporting opinions, as elucidated by commentary, unwittingly affords a disheartening preview of the mathematical quagmire (apart from divers judicially inappropriate and elusive determinants) into which this Court today catapults the lower courts of the country without so much as adumbrating the basis for a legal calculus as a means of extrication. Even assuming the indispensable intellectual disinterestedness on the part of judges in such matters, they do not have accepted legal standards or criteria or even reliable analogies to draw upon for making judicial judgments. To charge courts with the task of accommodating the incommensurable factors of policy that underlie these mathematical puzzles is to attribute, however flatteringly, omnicompetence to judges. The Framers of the Constitution persistently rejected a proposal that embodied this assumption and Thomas Jefferson never entertained it.

Recent legislation, creating a district appropriately described as "an atrocity of ingenuity," is not unique. Considering the gross inequality among legislative electoral units within almost every State, the Court naturally shrinks from asserting that in districting at least substantial equality is a constitutional requirement enforceable [369 U.S. 186, 269] by courts. * Room continues to be allowed for weighting. This of course implies that geography, economics, urban-rural conflict, and all the other non-legal factors which have throughout our history entered into political districting are to some extent not to be ruled out in the undefined vista now opened up by review in the federal courts of state reapportionments. To some extent - aye, there's the rub. In effect, today's decision empowers the courts of the country to devise what should constitute the proper composition of the legislatures of the fifty States. If state courts should for one reason or another find themselves unable to discharge this task, the duty of doing so is put on the federal courts or on this Court, if State views do not satisfy this Court's notion of what is proper districting.

We were soothingly told at the bar of this Court that we need not worry about the kind of remedy a court could effectively fashion once the abstract constitutional right to have courts pass on a state-wide system of electoral districting is recognized as a matter of judicial rhetoric, because legislatures would heed the Court's admonition. This is not only a euphoric hope. It implies a sorry [369 U.S. 186, 270] confession of judicial impotence in place of a frank acknowledgement that there is not under our Constitution a judicial remedy for every political mischief, for every undesirable exercise of legislative power. The Framers carefully and with deliberate forethought refused so to enthrone the judiciary. In this situation, as in others of like nature, appeal for relief does not belong here. Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate. In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives. In any event there is nothing judicially more unseemly nor more self-defeating than for this Court to make in terrorem pronouncements, to indulge in merely empty rhetoric, sounding a word of promise to the ear, sure to be disappointing to the hope.

This is the latest in the series of cases in which the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment have been invoked in federal courts as restrictions upon the power of the States to allocate electoral weight among the voting populations of their various geographical subdivisions. 1 The present action, which [369 U.S. 186, 271] comes here on appeal from an order of a statutory three-judge District Court dismissing amended complaints seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, challenges the provisions of Tenn. Code Ann., 1955 3-101 to 3-109, which apportion state representative and senatorial seats among Tennessee's ninety-five counties.

The original plaintiffs, citizens and qualified voters entitled to vote for members of the Tennessee Legislature in the several counties in which they respectively reside, bring this action in their own behalf and "on behalf of all other voters in the State of Tennessee," or, as they alternatively assert, "on behalf of all qualified voters of their respective counties, and further, on behalf of all voters of the State of Tennessee who are similarly situated." The cities of Knoxville and Chattanooga, and the Mayor of Nashville - on his own behalf as a qualified voter and, pursuant to an authorizing resolution by the Nashville City Council, as a representative of all the city's residents - were permitted to intervene as parties plaintiff. 2 The defendants are executive officials charged with statutory duties in connection with state elections. 3 [369 U.S. 186, 272]

The original plaintiffs' amended complaint avers, in substance, the following. 4 The Constitution of the State of Tennessee declares that "elections shall be free and equal," provides that no qualifications other than age, citizenship and specified residence requirements shall be attached to the right of suffrage, and prohibits denying to any person the suffrage to which he is entitled except upon conviction of an infamous crime. Art. I, 5; Art. IV, 1. It requires an enumeration of qualified voters within every term of ten years after 1871 and an apportionment of representatives and senators among the several counties or districts according to the number of qualified voters in each 5 at the time of each decennial [369 U.S. 186, 273] enumeration. Art. II, 4, 5, 6. Notwithstanding these provisions, the State Legislature has not reapportioned itself since 1901. The Reapportionment Act of that year, Tenn. Acts 1901, c. 122, now Tenn. Code Ann., 1955, 3-101 to 3-109, 6 was unconstitutional when enacted, because not preceded by the required enumeration of qualified voters and because it allocated legislative seats arbitrarily, unequally and discriminatorily, as measured by the 1900 federal census. Moreover, irrespective of the question of its validity in 1901, it is asserted that the Act became "unconstitutional and obsolete" in 1911 by virtue of the decennial reapportionment requirement of the Tennessee Constitution. Continuing a "purposeful and systematic plan to discriminate against a geographical class of persons," recent Tennessee Legislatures have failed, as did their predecessors, to enact reapportionment legislation, although a number of bills providing for reapportionment have been introduced. Because of population shifts since 1901, the apportionment fixed by the Act of that year and still in effect is not proportionate to population, denies to the counties in which the plaintiffs [369 U.S. 186, 274] live an additional number of representatives to which they are entitled, and renders plaintiffs' votes "not as effective as the votes of the voters residing in other senatorial and representative districts . . . ." Plaintiffs "suffer a debasement of their votes by virtue of the incorrect, arbitrary, obsolete and unconstitutional apportionment of the General Assembly . . .," and the totality of the malapportionment's effect - which permits a minority of about thirty-seven percent of the voting population of the State to control twenty of the thirty-three members of Tennessee's Senate, and a minority of forty percent of the voting population to control sixty-three of the ninety-nine members of the House - results in "a distortion of the constitutional system" established by the Federal and State Constitutions, prevents the General Assembly "from being a body representative of the people of the State of Tennessee, . . ." and is "contrary to the basic principle of representative government . . .," and "contrary to the philosophy of government in the United States and all Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence . . . ."

Exhibits appended to the complaint purport to demonstrate the extent of the inequalities of which plaintiffs complain. Based upon "approximate voting population," 7 these set forth figures showing that the State [369 U.S. 186, 275] Senator from Tennessee's most populous senatorial district represents five and two-tenths times the number of voters represented by the Senator from the least populous district, while the corresponding ratio for most and least populous House districts is more than eighteen to one. The General Assembly thus apportioned has discriminated against the underrepresented counties and in favor of the overrepresented counties in the collection and distribution of various taxes and tax revenues, notably in the distribution of school and highway-improvement funds, 8 this discrimination being "made possible and effective" by the Legislature's failure to reapportion itself. Plaintiffs conclude that election of the State Legislature pursuant to the apportionment fixed by the 1901 Act violates the Tennessee Constitution and deprives them of due process of law and of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Their prayer below was for a declaratory judgment striking down the Act, an injunction restraining defendants from any acts necessary to the holding of elections in the districts prescribed by Tenn. Code Ann., 1955, 3-101 to 3-109, until such time as the legislature is reapportioned "according to the [369 U.S. 186, 276] Constitution of the State of Tennessee," and an order directing defendants to declare the next primary and general elections for members of the Tennessee Legislature on an at-large basis - the thirty-three senatorial candidates and the ninety-nine representative candidates receiving the highest number of votes to be declared elected. 9

Motions to dismiss for want of jurisdiction of the subject matter and for failure to state a claim were made and granted, 179 F. Supp. 824, the District Court relying upon this Court's series of decisions beginning with Colegrove v. Green, 328 U.S. 549 , rehearing denied, 329 U.S. 825 , motion for reargument before the full bench denied, 329 U.S. 828 . The original and intervening plaintiffs bring the case here on appeal. 364 U.S. 898 . In this Court they have altered their request for relief, suggesting a "step-by-step approach." The first step is a remand to the District Court with directions to vacate the order dismissing the complaint and to enter an order retaining jurisdiction, providing "the necessary spur to legislative action . . . ." If this proves insufficient, appellants will ask the "additional spur" of an injunction prohibiting elections under the 1901 Act, or a declaration of the Act's unconstitutionality, or both. Finally, all other means failing, the District Court is invited by the plaintiffs, greatly daring, to order an election at large or redistrict the State itself or through a master. The Solicitor General of the United States, who has filed a brief amicus and argued in favor of reversal, asks the Court on this appeal to hold only that the District Court has "jurisdiction" and may properly exercise it to entertain the plaintiffs' claims on the merits. This would leave to that court after remand the questions of the challenged statute's [369 U.S. 186, 277] constitutionality and of some undefined, unadumbrated relief in the event a constitutional violation is found. After an argument at the last Term, the case was set down for reargument, 366 U.S. 907 , and heard this Term.

I.

In sustaining appellants' claim, based on the Fourteenth Amendment, that the District Court may entertain this suit, this Court's uniform course of decision over the years is overruled or disregarded. Explicitly it begins with Colegrove v. Green, supra, decided in 1946, but its roots run deep in the Court's historic adjudicatory process.

Colegrove held that a federal court should not entertain an action for declaratory and injunctive relief to adjudicate the constitutionality, under the Equal Protection Clause and other federal constitutional and statutory provisions, of a state statute establishing the respective districts for the State's election of Representatives to the Congress. Two opinions were written by the four Justices who composed the majority of the seven sitting members of the Court. Both opinions joining in the result in Colegrove v. Green agreed that considerations were controlling which dictated denial of jurisdiction though not in the strict sense of want of power. While the two opinions show a divergence of view regarding some of these considerations, there are important points of concurrence. Both opinions demonstrate a predominant concern, first, with avoiding federal judicial involvement in matters traditionally left to legislative policy making; second, with respect to the difficulty - in view of the nature of the problems of apportionment and its history in this country - of drawing on or devising judicial standards for judgment, as opposed to legislative determinations, of the part which mere numerical equality among voters should play as a criterion for the allocation of [369 U.S. 186, 278] political power; and, third, with problems of finding appropriate modes of relief - particularly, the problem of resolving the essentially political issue of the relative merits of at-large elections and elections held in districts of unequal population.

The broad applicability of these considerations - summarized in the loose shorthand phrase, "political question" - in cases involving a State's apportionment of voting power among its numerous localities has led the Court, since 1946, to recognize their controlling effect in a variety of situations. (In all these cases decision was by a full Court.) The "political question" principle as applied in Colegrove has found wide application commensurate with its function as "one of the rules basic to the federal system and this Court's appropriate place within that structure." Rescue Army v. Municipal Court, 331 U.S. 549, 570 . In Colegrove v. Barrett, 330 U.S. 804 , litigants brought suit in a Federal District Court challenging as offensive to the Equal Protection Clause Illinois' state legislative-apportionment laws. They pointed to state constitutional provisions requiring decennial reapportionment and allocation of seats in proportion to population, alleged a failure to reapportion for more than forty-five years - during which time extensive population shifts had rendered the legislative districts grossly unequal - and sought declaratory and injunctive relief with respect to all elections to be held thereafter. After the complaint was dismissed by the District Court, this Court dismissed an appeal for want of a substantial federal question. A similar District Court decision was affirmed here in Radford v. Gary, 352 U.S. 991 . And cf. Remmey v. Smith, 342 U.S. 916 . In Tedesco v. Board of Supervisors, 339 U.S. 940 , the Court declined to hear, for want of a substantial federal question, the claim that the division of a municipality into voting districts of unequal population for the selection for councilmen fell [369 U.S. 186, 279] afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment, and in Cox v. Peters, 342 U.S. 936 , rehearing denied, 343 U.S. 921 , it found no substantial federal question raised by a state court's dismissal of a claim for damages for "devaluation" of plaintiff's vote by application of Georgia's county-unit system in a primary election for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. The same Georgia system was subsequently attacked in a complaint for declaratory judgment and an injunction; the federal district judge declined to take the requisite steps for the convening of a statutory three-judge court; and this Court, in Hartsfield v. Sloan, 357 U.S. 916 , denied a motion for leave to file a petition for a writ of mandamus to compel the district judge to act. In MacDougall v. Green, 335 U.S. 281, 283 , the Court noted that "To assume that political power is a function exclusively of numbers is to disregard the practicalities of government," and, citing the Colegrove cases, declined to find in "such broad constitutional concepts as due process and equal protection of the laws," id., at 284, a warrant for federal judicial invalidation of an Illinois statute requiring as a condition for the formation of a new political party the securing of at least two hundred signatures from each of fifty counties. And in South v. Peters, 339 U.S. 276 , another suit attacking Georgia's county-unit law, it affirmed a District Court dismissal, saying

"Federal courts consistently refuse to exercise their equity powers in cases posing political issues arising from a state's geographical distribution of electoral strength among its political subdivisions." Id., at 277.

Of course it is important to recognize particular, relevant diversities among comprehensively similar situations. Appellants seek to distinguish several of this Court's prior decisions on one or another ground - Colegrove v. [369 U.S. 186, 280] Green on the ground that federal, not state, legislative apportionment was involved; Remmey v. Smith on the ground that state judicial remedies had not been tried; Radford v. Gary on the ground that Oklahoma has the initiative, whereas Tennessee does not. It would only darken counsel to discuss the relevance and significance of each of these assertedly distinguishing factors here and in the context of this entire line of cases. Suffice it that they do not serve to distinguish Colegrove v. Barrett, supra, which is on all fours with the present case, or to distinguish Kidd v. McCanless, 352 U.S. 920 , in which the full Court without dissent, only five years ago, dismissed on authority of Colegrove v. Green and Anderson v. Jordan, 343 U.S. 912 , an appeal from the Supreme Court of Tennessee in which a precisely similar attack was made upon the very statute now challenged. If the weight and momentum of an unvarying course of carefully considered decisions are to be respected, appellants' claims are foreclosed not only by precedents governing the exact facts of the present case but are themselves supported by authority the more persuasive in that it gives effect to the Colegrove principle in distinctly varying circumstances in which state arrangements allocating relative degrees of political influence among geographic groups of voters were challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment.

II.

The Colegrove doctrine, in the form in which repeated decisions have settled it, was not an innovation. It represents long judicial thought and experience. From its earliest opinions this Court has consistently recognized a class of controversies which do not lend themselves to judicial standards and judicial remedies. To classify the various instances as "political questions" is rather a form [369 U.S. 186, 281] of stating this conclusion than revealing of analysis. 10 Some of the cases so labelled have no relevance here. But from others emerge unifying considerations that are compelling.

1. The cases concerning war or foreign affairs, for example, are usually explained by the necessity of the country's speaking with one voice in such matters. While this concern alone undoubtedly accounts for many of the decisions, 11 others do not fit the pattern. It would hardly embarrass the conduct of war were this Court to determine, in connection with private transactions between litigants, the date upon which war is to be deemed terminated. But the Court has refused to do so. See, e. g., The Protector, 12 Wall. 700; Brown v. Hiatts, 15 wall. 177; Adger v. Alston, 15 Wall. 555; Williams v. Bruffy, 96 U.S. 176, 192 -193. It does not suffice to explain such cases as Ludecke v. Watkins, 335 U.S. 160 - deferring to political determination the question of the duration of war for purposes of the Presidential power to deport alien enemies - that judicial intrusion would seriously [369 U.S. 186, 282] impede the President's power effectively to protect the country's interests in time of war. Of course, this is true; but the precise issue presented is the duration of the time of war which demands the power. Cf. Martin v. Mott, 12 Wheat. 19; Lamar v. Browne, 92 U.S. 187, 193 ; Hamilton v. Kentucky Distilleries & Warehouse Co., 251 U.S. 146 ; Kahn v. Anderson, 255 U.S. 1 . And even for the purpose of determining the extent of congressional regulatory power over the tribes and dependent communities of Indians, it is ordinarily for Congress, not the Court, to determine whether or not a particular Indian group retains the characteristics constitutionally requisite to confer the power. 12 E. g., United States v. Holliday, 3 Wall. 407; Tiger v. Western Investment Co., 221 U.S. 286 ; United States v. Sandoval, 231 U.S. 28 . A controlling factor in such cases is that, decision respecting these kinds of complex matters of policy being traditionally committed not to courts but to the political agencies of government for determination by criteria of political expediency, there exists no standard ascertainable by settled judicial experience or process by reference to which a political decision affecting the question at issue between the parties can be judged. Where the question arises in the course of a litigation involving primarily the adjudication of other issues between the litigants, the Court accepts as a basis for adjudication the political departments' decision of it. But where its determination is the sole function to be served by the exercise of the judicial power, the Court will not entertain the action. See Chicago & Southern Air Lines, Inc., v. Waterman S. S. Corp., [369 U.S. 186, 283] 333 U.S. 103 . The dominant consideration is "the lack of satisfactory criteria for a judicial determination . . . ." Mr. Chief Justice Hughes, for the Court, in Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433, 454 -455. Compare United States v. Rogers, 4 How. 567, 572, with Worcester v. Georgia, 6 Pet. 515. 13

This may be, like so many questions of law, a matter of degree. Questions have arisen under the Constitution to which adjudication gives answer although the criteria for decision are less than unwavering bright lines. Often in these cases illumination was found in the federal structures established by, or the underlying presuppositions of, the Constitution. With respect to such questions, the Court has recognized that, concerning a particular power of Congress put in issue, ". . . effective restraints on its exercise must proceed from political rather than from judicial processes." Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111, 120 . It is also true that even regarding the duration of war and the status of Indian tribes, referred to above as subjects ordinarily committed exclusively to the non-judicial branches, the Court has suggested that some limitations exist upon the range within which the decisions of those branches will be permitted to go unreviewed. See United States v. Sandoval, supra, at 46; cf. Chastleton Corp. v. Sinclair, 264 U.S. 543 . But this is merely to acknowledge that particular circumstances may differ so greatly in degree as to differ thereby in kind, and that, although within a certain range of cases on a continuum, no standard of distinction can be found to tell between them, other cases will fall above or below the range. The doctrine of political questions, like any other, is not to [369 U.S. 186, 284] be applied beyond the limits of its own logic, with all the quiddities and abstract disharmonies it may manifest. See the disposition of contentions based on logically distorting views of Colegrove v. Green and Hunter v. Pittsburgh, 207 U.S. 161 , in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 .

2. The Court has been particularly unwilling to intervene in matters concerning the structure and organization of the political institutions of the States. The abstention from judicial entry into such areas has been greater even than that which marks the Court's ordinary approach to issues of state power challenged under broad federal guarantees. "We should be very reluctant to decide that we had jurisdiction in such a case, and thus in an action of this nature to supervise and review the political administration of a state government by its own officials and through its own courts. The jurisdiction of this court would only exist in case there had been . . . such a plain and substantial departure from the fundamental principles upon which our government is based that it could with truth and propriety be said that if the judgment were suffered to remain, the party aggrieved would be deprived of his life, liberty or property in violation of the provisions of the Federal Constitution." Wilson v. North Carolina, 169 U.S. 586, 596 . See Taylor and Marshall v. Beckham (No. 1), 178 U.S. 548 ; Walton v. House of Representatives, 265 U.S. 487 ; Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U.S. 1 . Cf. In re Sawyer, 124 U.S. 200, 220 -221.

Where, however, state law has made particular federal questions determinative of relations within the structure of state government, not in challenge of it, the Court has resolved such narrow, legally defined questions in proper proceedings. See Boyd v. Nebraska ex rel. Thayer, 143 U.S. 135 . In such instances there is no conflict between state policy and the exercise of federal judicial [369 U.S. 186, 285] power. This distinction explains the decisions in Smiley v. Holm, 285 U.S. 355 ; Koenig v. Flynn, 285 U.S. 375 ; and Carroll v. Becker, 285 U.S. 380 , in which the Court released state constitutional provisions prescribing local lawmaking procedures from misconceived restriction of superior federal requirements. Adjudication of the federal claim involved in those cases was not one demanding the accommodation of conflicting interests for which no readily accessible judicial standards could be found. See McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1 , in which, in a case coming here on writ of error from the judgment of a state court which had entertained it on the merits, the Court treated as justiciable the claim that a State could not constitutionally select its presidential electors by districts, but held that Art. II, 1, cl. 2, of the Constitution left the mode of choosing electors in the absolute discretion of the States. Cf. Pope v. Williams, 193 U.S. 621 ; Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 . To read with literalness the abstracted jurisdictional discussion in the McPherson opinion reveals the danger of conceptions of "justiciability" derived from talk and not from the effective decision in a case. In probing beneath the surface of cases in which the Court has declined to interfere with the actions of political organs of government, of decisive significance is whether in each situation the ultimate decision has been to intervene or not to intervene. Compare the reliance in South v. Peters, 339 U.S. 276 , on MacDougall v. Green, 335 U.S. 281 , and the "jurisdictional" form of the opinion in Wilson v. North Carolina, 169 U.S. 586, 596 , supra.

3. The cases involving Negro disfranchisement are no exception to the principle of avoiding federal judicial intervention into matters of state government in the absence of an explicit and clear constitutional imperative. For here the controlling command of Supreme Law is plain and unequivocal. An end of discrimination against [369 U.S. 186, 286] the Negro was the compelling motive of the Civil War Amendments. The Fifteenth expresses this in terms, and it is no less true of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth. Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 67-72; Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 306 -307; Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536, 541 . Thus the Court, in cases involving discrimination against the Negro's right to vote, has recognized not only the action at law for damages, 14 but, in appropriate circumstances, the extraordinary remedy of declaratory or injunctive relief. 15 Schnell v. Davis, 336 U.S. 933 ; Terry v. Adams, 345 U.S. 461 . 16 Injunctions in these cases, it should be noted, would not have restrained state-wide general elections. Compare Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 .

4. The Court has refused to exercise its jurisdiction to pass on "abstract questions of political power, of sovereignty, of government." Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U.S. 447, 485 . See Texas v. Interstate Commerce Commission, 258 U.S. 158, 162 ; New Jersey v. Sargent, 269 U.S. 328, 337 . The "political question" doctrine, in this aspect, reflects the policies underlying the requirement of "standing": that the litigant who would challenge official [369 U.S. 186, 287] action must claim infringement of an interest particular and personal to himself, as distinguished from a cause of dissatisfaction with the general frame and functioning of government - a complaint that the political institutions are awry. See Stearns v. Wood, 236 U.S. 75 ; Fairchild v. Hughes, 258 U.S. 126 ; United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75, 89 -91. What renders cases of this kind non-justiciable is not necessarily the nature of the parties to them, for the Court has resolved other issues between similar parties; 17 nor is it the nature of the legal question involved, for the same type of question has been adjudicated when presented in other forms of controversy. 18 The crux of the matter is that courts are not fit instruments of decision where what is essentially at stake is the composition of those large contests of policy traditionally fought out in non-judicial forums, by which governments and the actions of governments are made and unmade. See Texas v. White, 7 Wall. 700; White v. Hart, 13 Wall. 646; Phillips v. Payne, 92 U.S. 130 ; Marsh v. Burroughs, 1 Woods 463, 471-472 (Bradley, Circuit Justice); cf. Wilson v. Shaw, 204 U.S. 24 ; but see Coyle v. Smith, 221 U.S. 559 . Thus, where the Cherokee Nation sought by an original motion to restrain the State of Georgia from the enforcement of laws which assimilated Cherokee territory to the State's counties, abrogated Cherokee law, and abolished Cherokee government, the Court held that such a claim was not judicially cognizable. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 5 Pet. 1. 19 And in Georgia [369 U.S. 186, 288] v. Stanton, 6 Wall. 50, the Court dismissed for want of jurisdiction a bill by the State of Georgia seeking to enjoin enforcement of the Reconstruction Acts on the ground that the command by military districts which they established extinguished existing state government and replaced it with a form of government unauthorized by the Constitution: 20

"That these matters, both as stated in the body of the bill; and, in the prayers for relief, call for the judgment of the court upon political questions, and, upon rights, not of persons or property, but of a political character, will hardly be denied. For the rights for the protection of which our authority is invoked, are the rights of sovereignty, of political jurisdiction, of government, of corporate existence as a State, with all its constitutional powers and privileges. No case of private rights or private property infringed, or in danger of actual or threatened infringement, is presented by the bill, in a judicial form, for the judgment of the court." Id., at 77. 21 [369 U.S. 186, 289]

5. The influence of these converging considerations - the caution not to undertake decision where standards meet for judicial judgment are lacking, the reluctance to interfere with matters of state government in the absence of an unquestionable and effectively enforceable mandate, the unwillingness to make courts arbiters of the broad issues of political organization historically committed to other institutions and for whose adjustment the judicial process is ill-adapted - has been decisive of the settled line of cases, reaching back more than a century, which holds that Art. IV, 4, of the Constitution, guaranteeing to the States "a Republican Form of Government," 22 is not enforceable through the courts. E. g., O'Neill v. Leamer, 239 U.S. 244 ; Mountain Timber Co. v. Washington, 243 U.S. 219 ; Cochran v. Board of Education, 281 U.S. 370 ; Highland Farms Dairy, Inc., v. Agnew, 300 U.S. 608 . 23 Claims resting on this specific [369 U.S. 186, 290] guarantee of the Constitution have been held nonjusticiable which challenged state distribution of powers between the legislative and judicial branches, Ohio ex rel. Bryant v. Akron Metropolitan Park District, 281 U.S. 74 , state delegation of power to municipalities, Kiernan v. Portland, Oregon, 223 U.S. 151 , state adoption of the referendum as a legislative institution, Ohio ex rel. Davis v. Hildebrant, 241 U.S. 565, 569 , and state restriction upon the power of state constitutional amendment, Marshall v. Dye, 231 U.S. 250, 256 -257. The subject was fully considered in Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Oregon, 223 U.S. 118 , in which the Court dismissed for want of jurisdiction a writ of error attacking a state license-tax statute enacted by the initiative, on the claim that this mode of legislation was inconsistent with a Republican Form of Government and violated the Equal Protection Clause and other federal guarantees. After nothing ". . . the ruinous destruction of legislative authority in matters purely political which would necessarily be occasioned by giving sanction [369 U.S. 186, 291] to the doctrine which underlies and would be necessarily involved in sustaining the propositions contended for," 24 the Court said:

". . . [The] essentially political nature [of this claim] is at once made manifest by understanding that the assault which the contention here advanced makes it [sic] not on the tax as a tax, but on the State as a State. It is addressed to the framework and political character of the government by which the statute levying the tax was passed. It is the government, the political entity, which (reducing the case to its essence) is called to the bar of this court, not for the purpose of testing judicially some exercise of power assailed, on the ground that its exertion [369 U.S. 186, 292] has injuriously affected the rights of an individual because of repugnancy to some constitutional limitation, but to demand of the State that it establish its right to exist as a State, republican in form." Id., at 150-151.

The starting point of the doctrine applied in these cases is, of course, Luther v. Borden, 7 How. 1. The case arose out of the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1841-1842. Rhode Island, at the time of the separation from England, had not adopted a new constitution but had continued, in its existence as an independent State, under its original royal Charter, with certain statutory alterations. This frame of government provided no means for amendment of the fundamental law; the right of suffrage was to be prescribed by legislation, which limited it to freeholders. In the 1830's, largely because of the growth of towns in which there developed a propertied class whose means were not represented by freehold estates, dissatisfaction arose with the suffrage qualifications of the charter government. In addition, population shifts had caused a dated apportionment of seats in the lower house to yield substantial numerical inequality of political influence, even among qualified voters. The towns felt themselves underrepresented, and agitation began for electoral reform. When the charter government failed to respond, popular meetings of those who favored the broader suffrage were held and delegates elected to a convention which met and drafted a state constitution. This constitution provided for universal manhood suffrage (with certain qualifications); and it was to be adopted by vote of the people at elections at which a similarly expansive franchise obtained. This new scheme of government was ratified at the polls and declared effective by the convention, but the government elected and organized under it, with Dorr at its head, never came to power. The [369 U.S. 186, 293] charter government denied the validity of the convention, the constitution and its government and, after an insignificant skirmish, routed Dorr and his followers. It meanwhile provided for the calling of its own convention, which drafted a constitution that went peacefully into effect in 1843. 25

Luther v. Borden was a trespass action brought by one of Dorr's supporters in a United States Circuit Court to recover damages for the breaking and entering of his house. The defendants justified under military orders pursuant to martial law declared by the charter government, and plaintiff, by his reply, joined issue on the legality of the charter government subsequent to the adoption of the Dorr constitution. Evidence offered by the plaintiff tending to establish that the Dorr government was the rightful government of Rhode Island was rejected by the Circuit Court; the court charged the jury that the charter government was lawful; and on a verdict for defendants, plaintiff brought a writ of error to this Court.

The Court, through Mr. Chief Justice Taney, affirmed. After noting that the issue of the charter government's legality had been resolved in that government's favor by the state courts of Rhode Island - that the state courts, deeming the matter a political one unfit for judicial determination, had declined to entertain attacks upon the existence and authority of the charter government - the Chief Justice held that the courts of the United States must follow those of the State in this regard. Id., at 39-40. It was recognized that the compulsion to follow [369 U.S. 186, 294] state law would not apply in a federal court in the face of a superior command found in the Federal Constitution, ibid., but no such command was found. The Constitution, the Court said - referring to the Guarantee Clause of the Fourth Article - ". . . as far as it has provided for an emergency of this kind, and authorized the general government to interfere in the domestic concerns of a State, has treated the subject as political in its nature, and placed the power in the hands of that department." Id., at 42.

"Under this article of the Constitution it rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a State. For as the United States guarantee to each State a republican government, Congress must necessarily decide what government is established in the State before it can determine whether it is republican or not. And when the senators and representatives of a State are admitted into the councils of the Union, the authority of the government under which they are appointed, as well as its republican character, is recognized by the proper constitutional authority. And its decision is binding on every other department of the government, and could not be questioned in a judicial tribunal. It is true that the contest in this case did not last long enough to bring the matter to this issue; and as no senators or representatives were elected under the authority of the government of which Mr. Dorr was the head, Congress was not called upon to decide the controversy. Yet the right to decide is placed there, and not in the courts." Ibid. 26 [369 U.S. 186, 295]

In determining this issue non-justiciable, the Court was sensitive to the same considerations to which its later decisions have given the varied applications already discussed. It adverted to the delicacy of judicial intervention into the very structure of government. 27 It acknowledged that tradition had long entrusted questions of this nature to non-judicial processes, 28 and that judicial processes were unsuited to their decision. 29 The absence of guiding standards for judgment was critical, for the question whether the Dorr constitution had been rightfully adopted depended, in part, upon the extent of the franchise to be recognized - the very point of contention over which rebellion had been fought.

". . . [I]f the Circuit Court had entered upon this inquiry, by what rule could it have determined the qualification of voters upon the adoption or rejection of the proposed constitution, unless there was some previous law of the State to guide it? It is the province of a court to expound the law, not to make it. And certainly it is no part of the judicial functions of any court of the United States to prescribe the qualification of voters in a State, giving the right to those to whom it is denied by the written and established constitution and laws of the State, or taking it away from those to whom it is given; nor has it the right to determine what political privileges [369 U.S. 186, 296] the citizens of a State are entitled to, unless there is an established constitution or law to govern its decision." Id., at 41.

Mr. Justice Woodbury (who dissented with respect to the effect of martial law) agreed with the Court regarding the inappropriateness of judicial inquiry into the issues:

"But, fortunately for our freedom from political excitements in judicial duties, this court can never with propriety be called on officially to be the umpire in questions merely political. The adjustment of these questions belongs to the people and their political representatives, either in the State or general government. These questions relate to matters not to be settled on strict legal principles. They are adjusted rather by inclination, - or prejudice or compromise, often. Some of them succeed or are defeated even by public policy alone, or mere naked power, rather than intrinsic right. . . .

"Another evil, alarming and little foreseen, involved in regarding these as questions for the final arbitrament of judges would be, that in such an event all political privileges and rights would, in a dispute among the people, depend on our decision finally. . . . [D]isputed points in making constitutions, depending often, as before shown, on policy, inclination, popular resolves, and popular will, . . . if the people, in the distribution of powers under the constitution, should ever think of making judges supreme arbiters in political controversies, when not selected by nor, frequently, amenable to them, nor at liberty to follow such various considerations in their judgments as belong to mere political questions, they will dethrone themselves and lose one of their own invaluable birthrights; building up in this way - slowly, but surely - a new sovereign power in the [369 U.S. 186, 297] republic, in most respects irresponsible and unchangeable for life, and one more dangerous, in theory at least, than the worst elective oligarchy in the worst of times. . . ." Id., at 51-53. 30

III.

The present case involves all of the elements that have made the Guarantee Clause cases non-justiciable. It is, in effect, a Guarantee Clause claim masquerading under a different label. But it cannot make the case more fit for judicial action that appellants invoke the Fourteenth Amendment rather than Art. IV, 4, where, in fact, the gist of their complaint is the same - unless it can be found that the Fourteenth Amendment speaks with greater particularity to their situation. We have been admonished to avoid "the tyranny of labels." Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U.S. 97, 114 . Art. IV, 4, is not committed by express constitutional terms to Congress. It is the nature of the controversies arising under it, nothing else, which has made it judicially unenforceable. Of course, if a controversy falls within judicial power, it depends "on how he [the plaintiff] casts his action," Pan American Petroleum Corp. v. Superior Court, 366 U.S. 656, 662 , whether he brings himself within a jurisdictional statute. But where judicial competence is wanting, it cannot be created by invoking one clause of the Constitution rather than another. When what was essentially a Guarantee Clause claim was sought to be laid, as well, under the Equal Protection Clause in Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Oregon, supra, the Court had no difficulty in "dispelling [369 U.S. 186, 298] any mere confusion resulting from forms of expression and considering the substance of things . . . ." 223 U.S., at 140 .

Here appellants attack "the State as a State," precisely as it was perceived to be attacked in the Pacific States case, id., at 150. Their complaint is that the basis of representation of the Tennessee Legislature hurts them. They assert that "a minority now rules in Tennessee," that the apportionment statute results in a "distortion of the constitutional system," that the General Assembly is no longer "a body representative of the people of the State of Tennessee," all "contrary to the basic principle of representative government . . . ." Accepting appellants' own formulation of the issue, one can know this handsaw from a hawk. Such a claim would be non-justiciable not merely under Art. IV, 4, but under any clause of the Constitution, by virtue of the very fact that a federal court is not a forum for political debate. Massachusetts v. Mellon, supra.

But appellants, of course, do not rest on this claim simpliciter. In invoking the Equal Protection Clause, they assert that the distortion of representative government complained of is produced by systematic discrimination against them, by way of "a debasement of their votes . . . ." Does this characterization, with due regard for the facts from which it is derived, add anything to appellants' case? 31

At first blush, this charge of discrimination based on legislative underrepresentation is given the appearance of [369 U.S. 186, 299] a more private, less impersonal claim, than the assertion that the frame of government is askew. Appellants appear as representatives of a class that is prejudiced as a class, in contradistinction to the polity in its entirety. However, the discrimination relied on is the deprivation of what appellants conceive to be their proportionate share of political influence. This, of course, is the practical effect of any allocation of power within the institutions of government. Hardly any distribution of political authority that could be assailed as rendering government non-republican would fail similarly to operate to the prejudice of some groups, and to the advantage of others, within the body politic. It would be ingenuous not to see, or consciously blind to deny, that the real battle over the initiative and referendum, or over a delegation of power to local rather than state-wide authority, is the battle between forces whose influence is disparate among the various organs of government to whom power may be given. No shift of power but works a corresponding shift in political influence among the groups composing a society.

What, then, is this question of legislative apportionment? Appellants invoke the right to vote and to have their votes counted. 32 But they are permitted to vote and their votes are counted. They go to the polls, they cast their ballots, they send their representatives to the state [369 U.S. 186, 300] councils. Their complaint is simply that the representatives are not sufficiently numerous or powerful - in short, that Tennessee has adopted a basis of representation with which they are dissatisfied. Talk of "debasement" or "dilution" is circular talk. One cannot speak of "debasement" or "dilution" of the value of a vote until there is first defined a standard of reference as to what a vote should be worth. What is actually asked of the Court in this case is to choose among competing bases of representation - ultimately, really, among competing theories of political philosophy - in order to establish an appropriate frame of government for the State of Tennessee and thereby for all the States of the Union.

In such a matter, abstract analogies which ignore the facts of history deal in unrealities; they betray reason. This is not a case in which a State has, through a device however oblique and sophisticated, denied Negroes or Jews or redheaded persons a vote, or given them only a third or a sixth of a vote. That was Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 . What Tennessee illustrates is an old and still widespread method of representation - representation by local geographical division, only in part respective of population - in preference to others, others, forsooth, more appealing. Appellants contest this choice and seek to make this Court the arbiter of the disagreement. They would make the Equal Protection Clause the charter of adjudication, asserting that the equality which it guarantees comports, if not the assurance of equal weight to every voter's vote, at least the basic conception that representation ought to be proportionate to population, a standard by reference to which the reasonableness of apportionment plans may be judged.

To find such a political conception legally enforceable in the broad and unspecific guarantee of equal protection is to rewrite the Constitution. See Luther v. Borden, supra. Certainly, "equal protection" is no more secure [369 U.S. 186, 301] a foundation for judicial judgment of the permissibility of varying forms of representative government than is "Republican Form." Indeed since "equal protection of the laws" can only mean an equality of persons standing in the same relation to whatever governmental action is challenged, the determination whether treatment is equal presupposes a determination concerning the nature of the relationship. This, with respect to apportionment, means an inquiry into the theoretic base of representation in an acceptably republican state. For a court could not determine the equal-protection issue without in fact first determining the Republican-Form issue, simply because what is reasonable for equal-protection purposes will depend upon what frame of government, basically, is allowed. To divorce "equal protection" from "Republican Form" is to talk about half a question.

The notion that representation proportioned to the geographic spread of population is so universally accepted as a necessary element of equality between man and man that it must be taken to be the standard of a political equality preserved by the Fourteenth Amendment - that it is, in appellants' words "the basic principle of representative government" - is, to put it bluntly, not true. However desirable and however desired by some among the great political thinkers and framers of our government, it has never been generally practiced, today or in the past. It was not the English system, it was not the colonial system, it was not the system chosen for the national government by the Constitution, it was not the system exclusively or even predominantly practiced by the States at the time of adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, it is not predominantly practiced by the States today. Unless judges, the judges of this Court, are to make their private views of political wisdom the measure of the Constitution - views which in all honesty cannot but give the appearance, if not reflect the reality, of [369 U.S. 186, 302] involvement with the business of partisan politics so inescapably a part of apportionment controversies - the Fourteenth Amendment, "itself a historical product," Jackman v. Rosenbaum Co., 260 U.S. 22, 31 , provides no guide for judicial oversight of the representation problem.

1. Great Britain. Writing in 1958, Professor W. J. M. Mackenzie aptly summarized the British history of the principle of representation proportioned to population: "`Equal electoral districts' formed part of the programme of radical reform in England in the 1830s, the only part of that programme which has not been realised." 33 Until the late nineteenth century, the sole base of representation (with certain exceptions not now relevant) was the local geographical unit: each county or borough returned its fixed number of members, usually two for the English units, regardless of population. 34 Prior to the Reform Act of 1832, this system was marked by the almost total disfranchisement of the populous northern industrial centers, which had grown to significant size at the advent of the Industrial Revolution and had not been granted borough representation, and by the existence of the rotten borough, playing its substantial part in the Crown's struggle for continued control of the Commons. 35 In 1831, ten southernmost English counties, numbering three and a quarter million people, had two hundred and thirty-five parliamentary representatives, while the six northernmost counties, with more than three and a half million people, had sixty-eight. 36 It was said that one hundred and eighty persons appointed three hundred and [369 U.S. 186, 303] fifty members in the Commons. 37 Less than a half century earlier, Madison in the Federalist had remarked that half the House was returned by less than six thousand of the eight million people of England and Scotland. 38

The Act of 1832, the product of a fierce partisan political struggle and the occasion of charges of gerrymandering not without foundation, 39 effected eradication of only the most extreme numerical inequalities of the unreformed system. It did not adopt the principle of representation based on population, but merely disfranchised certain among the rotten borough and enfranchised most of the urban centers - still quite without regard to their relative numbers. 40 In the wake of the Act there remained substantial electoral inequality: the boroughs of Cornwall were represented sixteen times as weightily, judged by population, as the county's eastern division; the average ratio of seats to population in ten agricultural counties was four and a half times that in ten manufacturing divisions; Honiton, with about three thousand inhabitants, was equally represented with Liverpool, which had four hundred thousand. 41 In 1866 apportionment by population began to be advocated generally in the House, but was not made the basis of the redistribution of 1867, although the act of that year did apportion representation more evenly, gauged by the population standard. 42 Population shifts increased the surviving inequalities; by 1884 the representation ratio [369 U.S. 186, 304] in many small boroughs was more than twenty-two times that of Birmingham or Manchester, forty-to-one disparities could be found elsewhere, and, in sum, in the 1870's and 1880's, a fourth of the electorate returned two-thirds of the members of the House. 43

The first systematic English attempt to distribute seats by population was the Redistribution Act of 1885. 44 The statute still left ratios of inequality of as much as seven to one, 45 which had increased to fifteen to one by 1912. 46 In 1918 Parliament again responded to "shockingly bad" conditions of inequality, 47 and to partisan political inspiration, 48 by redistribution. 49 In 1944, redistribution was put on a periodic footing by the House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act of that year, 50 which committed a continuing primary responsibility for reapportioning the Commons to administrative agencies (Boundary Commissions for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, respectively). 51 The Commissions, having regard to certain rules prescribed for their guidance, are to prepare at designated intervals reports for the Home Secretary's submission to Parliament, along with the draft of an Order in Council to give effect to the [369 U.S. 186, 305] Commissions' recommendations. The districting rules adopt the basic principle of representation by population, although the principle is significantly modified by directions to respect local geographic boundaries as far as practicable, and by discretion to take account of special geographical conditions, including the size, shape and accessibility of constituencies. Under the original 1944 Act, the rules provided that (subject to the exercise of the discretion respecting special geographical conditions and to regard for the total size of the House of Commons as prescribed by the Act) so far as practicable, the single-member districts should not deviate more than twenty-five percent from the electoral quota (population divided by number of constituencies). However, apparently at the recommendation of the Boundary Commission for England, the twenty-five percent standard was eliminated as too restrictive in 1947, and replaced by the flexible provision that constituencies are to be as near the electoral quota as practicable, a rule which is expressly subordinated both to the consideration of special geographic conditions and to that of preserving local boundaries. 52 Free of the twenty-five percent rule, the Commissions drew up plans of distribution in which inequalities among the districts run, in ordinary cases, as high as two to one and, in the case of a few extraordinary constituencies, three to one. 53 The action of the Boundary Commission for England was twice challenged in the courts in 1954 - the claim being that the Commission had violated statutory rules [369 U.S. 186, 306] prescribing the standards for its judgment - and in both cases the Judges declined to intervene. In Hammersmith Borough Council v. Boundary Commission for England, 54 Harman, J., was of opinion that the nature of the controversy and the scheme of the Acts made the matter inappropriate for judicial interference, and in Harper v. Home Secretary, 55 the Court of Appeal, per Evershed, M. R., quoting Harman, J., with approval, adverting to the wide range of discretion entrusted to the Commission under the Acts, and remarking the delicate character of the parliamentary issues in which it was sought to engage the court, reached the same conclusion. 56

The House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act, 1958, 57 made two further amendments to the law. Responsive to the recommendation of the Boundary Commission for England, 58 the interval permitted between Commission reports was more than doubled, to a new maximum of fifteen years. 59 And at the suggestion of the same Commission that "It would ease the future labours of the Commission and remove much local irritation if Rule 5 [requiring that the electorate of each constituency be as near the electoral quota as practicable] were to be so amended as to allow us to make recommendations preserving the status quo in any area where such a course appeared to be desirable and not inconsistent [369 U.S. 186, 307] with the broad intention of the Rules," 60 the Commissions were directed to consider the inconvenience attendant upon the alteration of constituencies, and the local ties which such alteration might break. The Home Secretary's view of this amendment was that it worked to erect "a presumption against making changes unless there is a very strong case for them." 61

2. The Colonies and the Union. For the guiding political theorists of the Revolutionary generation, the English system of representation, in its most salient aspects of numerical inequality, was a model to be avoided, not followed. 62 Nevertheless, the basic English principle of apportioning representatives among the local governmental entities, towns or counties, rather than among units of approximately equal population, had early taken root in the colonies. 63 In some, as in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, numbers of electors were taken into account, in a rough fashion, by allotting increasing fixed quotas of representatives to several towns or classes of towns graduated by population, but in most of the colonies delegates were allowed to the local units without respect to numbers. 64 This resulted in grossly unequal electoral units. 65 The representation ratio in one North Carolina county was more than eight times that in another. 66 Moreover, American rotten boroughs had appeared, 67 and apportionment was made an instrument first in the political [369 U.S. 186, 308] struggles between the King or the royal governors and the colonial legislatures, 68 and, later, between the older tidewater regions in the colonies and the growing interior. 69 Madison in the Philadelphia Convention adverted to the "inequality of the Representation in the Legislatures of particular States, . . ." 70 arguing that it was necessary to confer on Congress the power ultimately to regulate the times, places and manner of selecting Representatives, 71 in order to forestall the overrepresented counties' securing themselves a similar overrepresentation in the national councils. The example of South Carolina, where Charleston's overrepresentation was a continuing bone of contention between the tidewater and the back country, was cited by Madison in the Virginia Convention and by King in the Massachusetts Convention, in support of the same power, and King also spoke of the extreme numerical inequality arising from Connecticut's town-representation system. 72

Such inequalities survived the constitutional period. The United States Constitution itself did not largely adopt the principle of numbers. Apportionment of the national legislature among the States was one of the most difficult problems for the Convention; 73 its solution - involving State representation in the Senate 74 and the three-fifths compromise in the House 75 - left neither chamber apportioned proportionately to population. [369 U.S. 186, 309] Within the States, electoral power continued to be allotted to favor the tidewater. 76 Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia, recorded the "very unequal" representation there: individual counties differing in population by a ratio of more than seventeen to one elected the same number of representatives, and those nineteen thousand of Virginia's fifty thousand men who lived between the falls of the rivers and the seacoast returned half the State's senators and almost half its delegates. 77 In South Carolina in 1790, the three lower districts, with a white population of less than twenty-nine thousand elected twenty senators and seventy assembly members; while in the uplands more than one hundred and eleven thousand white persons elected seventeen senators and fifty-four assemblymen. 78

In the early nineteenth century, the demands of the interior became more insistent. The apportionment quarrel in Virginia was a major factor in precipitating the calling of a constitutional convention in 1829. Bitter animosities racked the convention, threatening the State with disunion. At last a compromise which gave the three hundred and twenty thousand people of the west thirteen senators, as against the nineteen senators returned by the three hundred sixty-three thousand people of the east, commanded agreement. It was adopted at the polls but left the western counties so dissatisfied that there were threats of revolt and realignment with the State of Maryland. 79

Maryland, however, had her own numerical disproportions. In 1820, one representative vote in Calvert County [369 U.S. 186, 310] was worth five in Frederick County, and almost two hundred thousand people were represented by eighteen members, while fifty thousand others elected twenty. 80 This was the result of the county-representation system of allotment. And, except for Massachusetts which, after a long struggle, did adopt representation by population at the mid-century, a similar town-representation principle continued to prevail in various forms throughout New England, with all its attendant, often gross inequalities. 81

3. The States at the time of ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and those later admitted. The several state conventions throughout the first half of the nineteenth century were the scenes of fierce sectional and party strifes respecting the geographic allocation of representation. 82 Their product was a wide variety of apportionment methods which recognized the element of population in differing ways and degrees. Particularly pertinent to appraisal of the contention that the Fourteenth Amendment embodied a standard limiting the freedom of the States with regard to the principles and bases of local legislative apportionment is an examination of the apportionment provisions of the thirty-three States which ratified the Amendment between 1866 and 1870, at their respective times of ratification. These may be considered in two groups: (A) the ratifying States other than the ten Southern States whose constitutions, at the time of ratification or shortly thereafter, were the work of the Reconstruction Act conventions; 83 and [369 U.S. 186, 311] (B) the ten Reconstruction-Act States. All thirty-three are significant, because they demonstrate how unfounded is the assumption that the ratifying States could have agreed on a standard apportionment theory or practice, and how baseless the suggestion that by voting for the Equal Protection Clause they sought to establish a test mold for apportionment which - if appellants' argument is sound - struck down sub silentio not a few of their own state constitutional provisions. But the constitutions of the ten Reconstruction-Act States have an added importance, for it is scarcely to be thought that the Congress which was so solicitous for the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment as to make the readmission of the late rebel States to Congress turn on their respective ratifications of it, would have approved constitutions which - again, under appellants' theory - contemporaneously offended the Amendment.

A. Of the twenty-three ratifying States of the first group, seven or eight had constitutions which demanded or allowed apportionment of both houses on the basis of population, 84 unqualifiedly or with only qualifications respecting the preservation of local boundaries. 85 Three [369 U.S. 186, 312] more apportioned on what was essentially a population base, but provided that in one house counties having a specified fraction of a ratio - a moiety or two-thirds - should have a representative. 86 Since each of these three States limited the size of their chambers, the fractional rule could operate - and, at least in Michigan, has in fact operated 87 - to produce substantial numerical inequalities [369 U.S. 186, 313] in favor of the sparsely populated counties. 88 Iowa favored her small counties by the rule that no more than four counties might be combined in a representative district, 89 and New York and Kansas compromised population and county-representation principles by assuring every county, regardless of the number of its inhabitants, at least one seat in their respective Houses. 90

Ohio and Maine recognized the factor of numbers by a different device. The former gave a House representative to each county having half a ratio, two representatives for a ratio and three-quarters, three representatives for three ratios, and a single additional representative for each additional ratio. 91 The latter, after apportioning among counties on a population base, gave each town of fifteen hundred inhabitants one representative, each town of three thousand, seven hundred and fifty inhabitants two representatives, and so on in increasing intervals to twenty-six thousand, two hundred and fifty inhabitants - towns of that size or larger receiving the maximum permitted number of representatives: seven. 92 The departure from numerical equality under these systems is apparent: in Maine, assuming the incidence of towns in [369 U.S. 186, 314] all categories, representative ratios would differ by factors of two and a half to one, at a minimum. Similarly, Missouri gave each of its counties, however small, one representative, two representatives for three ratios, three representatives for six ratios, and one additional representative for each three ratios above six. 93 New Hampshire allotted a representative to each town of one hundred and fifty ratable male polls of voting age and one more representative for each increment of three hundred above that figure; 94 its Senate was not apportioned by population but among districts based on the proportion of direct taxes paid. 95 In Pennsylvania, the basis of apportionment in both houses was taxable inhabitants; and in the House every county of at least thirty-five hundred taxables had a representative, nor could more than three counties be joined in forming a representative district; while in the Senate no city or county could have more than four of the State's twenty-five to thirty-three senators. 96

Finally, four States apportioned at least one House with no regard whatever to population. In Connecticut 97 and Vermont 98 representation in the House was on a town basis; Rhode Island gave one senator to each of its towns or cities, 99 and New Jersey, one to each of its counties. 100 [369 U.S. 186, 315] Nor, in any of these States, was the other House apportioned on a strict principle of equal numbers: Connecticut gave each of its counties a minimum of two senators 101 and Vermont, one; 102 New Jersey assured each county a representative; 103 and in Rhode Island, which gave at least one representative to each town or city, no town or city could have more than one-sixth of the total number in the House. 104

B. Among the ten late Confederate States affected by the Reconstruction Acts, in only four did it appear that apportionment of both state legislative houses would or might be based strictly on population. 105 In North Carolina, 106 South Carolina, 107 Louisiana, 108 and Alabama, 109 each county (in the case of Louisiana, each parish) was assured at least one seat in the lower House irrespective of numbers - a distribution which exhausted, respectively, [369 U.S. 186, 316] on the basis of the number of then-existing counties, three-quarters, one-quarter, two-fifths and three-fifths of the maximum possible number of representatives, before a single seat was available for assignment on a population basis; and in South Carolina, moreover, the Senate was composed of one member elected from each county, except that Charleston sent two. 110 In Florida's House, each county had one seat guaranteed and an additional seat for every thousand registered voters up to a maximum of four representatives; 111 while Georgia, whose Senate seats were distributed among forty-four single-member districts each composed of three contiguous counties, 112 assigned representation in its House as follows: three seats to each of the six most populous counties, two to each of the thirty-one next most populous, one to each of the remaining ninety-five. 113 As might be expected, the one-representative-per-county minimum pattern has proved incompatible with numerical equality, 114 and Georgia's [369 U.S. 186, 317] county-clustering system has produced representative-ratio disparities, between the largest and smallest counties, of more than sixty to one. 115

C. The constitutions 116 of the thirteen States which Congress admitted to the Union after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment showed a similar pattern. Six of them required or permitted apportionment of both Houses by population, subject only to qualifications concerning local boundaries. 117 Wyoming, apportioning by population, guaranteed to each of its counties at least one seat in each House, 118 and Idaho, which prescribed (after the first legislative session) that apportionment should be "as may be provided by law," gave each county at least one representative. 119 In Oklahoma, House members were apportioned among counties so as to give one [369 U.S. 186, 318] seat for half a ratio, two for a ratio and three-quarters, and one for each additional ratio up to a maximum of seven representatives per county. 120 Montana required reapportionment of its House on the basis of periodic enumerations according to ratios to be fixed by law 121 but its counties were represented as counties in the Senate, each county having one senator. 122 Alaska 123 and Hawaii 124 each apportioned a number of senators among constitutionally fixed districts; their respective Houses were to be periodically reapportioned by population, subject to a moiety rule in Alaska 125 and to Hawaii's guarantee of one representative to each of four constitutionally designated areas. 126 The Arizona Constitution assigned representation to each county in each house, giving one or two senators and from one to seven representatives to each, and making no provision for reapportionment. 127 [369 U.S. 186, 319]

4. Contemporary apportionment. Detailed recent studies are available to describe the present-day constitutional and statutory status of apportionment in the fifty States. 128 They demonstrate a decided twentieth-century trend away from population as the exclusive base of representation. Today, only a dozen state constitutions provide for periodic legislative reapportionment of both houses by a substantially unqualified application of the population standard, 129 and only about a dozen more prescribe such reapportionment for even a single chamber. "Specific provision for county representation in at least one house of the state legislature has been increasingly adopted since the end of the 19th century. . . ." 130 More than twenty States now guarantee each county at least one seat in one of their houses regardless of population, and in nine others county or town units are given equal representation in one legislative branch, whatever the number of each unit's inhabitants. Of course, numerically considered, "These provisions invariably result in over-representation of the least populated areas. . . ." 131 And in an effort to curb the political dominance of metropolitan regions, at least ten States now limit the maximum entitlement of any single county (or, in some cases, city) [369 U.S. 186, 320] in one legislative house - another source of substantial numerical disproportion. 132

Moreover, it is common knowledge that the legislatures have not kept reapportionment up to date, even where state constitutions in terms require it. 133 In particular, the pattern of according greater per capita representation to rural, relatively sparsely populated areas - the same pattern which finds expression in various state constitutional provisions, 134 and which has been given effect in England and elsewhere 135 - has, in some of the States, been made the law by legislative inaction in the face of [369 U.S. 186, 321] population shifts. 136 Throughout the country, urban and suburban areas tend to be given higher representation ratios than do rural areas. 137

The stark fact is that if among the numerous widely varying principles and practices that control state legislative apportionment today there is any generally prevailing feature, that feature is geographic inequality in relation to the population standard. 138 Examples could be endlessly multiplied. In New Jersey, counties of [369 U.S. 186, 322] thirty-five thousand and of more than nine hundred and five thousand inhabitants respectively each have a single senator. 139 Representative districts in Minnesota range from 7,290 inhabitants to 107,246 inhabitants. 140 Ratios of senatorial representation in California vary as much as two hundred and ninety-seven to one. 141 In Oklahoma, the range is ten to one for House constituencies and roughly sixteen to one for Senate constituencies. 142 Colebrook, Connecticut - population 592 - elects two House representatives; Hartford - population 177,397 - also elects two. 143 The first, third and fifth of these examples are the products of constitutional provisions which subordinate population to regional considerations in apportionment; the second is the result of legislative inaction; the fourth derives from both constitutional and legislative sources. A survey made in 1955, in sum, reveals that less than thirty percent of the population inhabit districts sufficient to elect a House majority in thirteen States and a Senate majority in nineteen States. 144 These figures show more than individual variations from a generally accepted standard of electoral equality. They show that there is not - as there has never been - a standard by [369 U.S. 186, 323] which the place of equality as a factor in apportionment can be measured.

Manifestly, the Equal Protection Clause supplies no clearer guide for judicial examination of apportionment methods than would the Guarantee Clause itself. Apportionment, by its character, is a subject of extraordinary complexity, involving - even after the fundamental theoretical issues concerning what is to be represented in a representative legislature have been fought out or compromised - considerations of geography, demography, electoral convenience, economic and social cohesions or divergencies among particular local groups, communications, the practical effects of political institutions like the lobby and the city machine, ancient traditions and ties of settled usage, respect for proven incumbents of long experience and senior status, mathematical mechanics, censuses compiling relevant data, and a host of others. 145 [369 U.S. 186, 324] Legislative responses throughout the country to the reapportionment demands of the 1960 Census have glaringly confirmed that these are not factors that lend themselves to evaluations of a nature that are the staple of judicial determinations or for which judges are equipped to adjudicate by legal training or experience or native wit. And this is the more so true because in every strand of this complicated, intricate web of values meet the contending forces of partisan politics. 146 The practical significance of apportionment is that the next election results may differ because of it. Apportionment battles are overwhelmingly party or intra-party contests. 147 It will add a virulent source of friction and tension in federal-state relations to embroil the federal judiciary in them. 148 [369 U.S. 186, 325]

IV.

Appellants, however, contend that the federal courts may provide the standard which the Fourteenth Amendment lacks by reference to the provisions of the constitution of Tennessee. The argument is that although the same or greater disparities of electoral strength may be suffered to exist immune from federal judicial review in States where they result from apportionment legislation consistent with state constitutions, the Tennessee Legislature may not abridge the rights which, on its face, its own constitution appears to give, without by that act denying equal protection of the laws. It is said that the law of Tennessee, as expressed by the words of its written constitution, has made the basic choice among policies in favor of representation proportioned to population, and that it is no longer open to the State to allot its voting power on other principles.

This reasoning does not bear analysis. Like claims invoking state constitutional requirement have been rejected here and for good reason. It is settled that whatever federal consequences may derive from a discrimination worked by a state statute must be the same as if the same discrimination were written into the [369 U.S. 186, 326] State's fundamental law. Nashville, C. & St. L. R. Co. v. Browning, 310 U.S. 362 . And see Castillo v. McConnico, 168 U.S. 674 ; Coulter v. Louisville & N. R. Co., 196 U.S. 599, 608 -609; Owensboro Waterworks Co. v. Owensboro, 200 U.S. 38 ; Hebert v. Louisiana, 272 U.S. 312, 316 -317; Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U.S. 1, 11 . Appellants complain of a practice which, by their own allegations, has been the law of Tennessee for sixty years. They allege that the Apportionment Act of 1901 created unequal districts when passed and still maintains unequal districts. They allege that the Legislature has since 1901 purposefully retained unequal districts. And the Supreme Court of Tennessee has refused to invalidate the law establishing these unequal districts. Kidd v. McCanless, 200 Tenn. 273, 292 S. W. 2d 40; appeal dismissed here in 352 U.S. 920 . In these circumstances, what was said in the Browning case, supra, at 369, clearly governs this case:

". . . Here, according to petitioner's own claim, all the organs of the state are conforming to a practice, systematic, unbroken for more than forty years, and now questioned for the first time. It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of `laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it. Settled state practice cannot supplant constitutional guarantees, but it can establish what is state law. The Equal Protection Clause did not write an empty formalism into the Constitution. Deeply embedded traditional ways of carrying out state policy, such as those of which petitioner complains, are often tougher and truer law than the dead words of the written text. . . . [T]he Equal Protection Clause is not a command of candor. . . ." [369 U.S. 186, 327]

Tennessee's law and its policy respecting apportionment are what 60 years of practice show them to be, not what appellants cull from the unenforced and, according to its own judiciary, unenforceable words of its Constitution. The statute comes here on the same footing, therefore, as would the apportionment laws of New Jersey, California or Connecticut, 149 and is unaffected by its supposed repugnance to the state constitutional language on which appellants rely. 150

In another aspect, however, the Kidd v. McCanless case, supra, introduces a factor peculiar to this litigation, which only emphasizes the duty of declining the exercise of federal judicial jurisdiction. In all of the apportionment cases which have come before the Court, a consideration which has been weighty in determining their non-justiciability has been the difficulty or impossibility of devising effective judicial remedies in this class of case. An injunction restraining a general election unless the legislature reapportions would paralyze the critical centers of a State's political system and threaten political dislocation whose consequences are not foreseeable. A declaration devoid [369 U.S. 186, 328] of implied compulsion of injunctive or other relief would be an idle threat. 151 Surely a Federal District Court could not itself remap the State: the same complexities which impede effective judicial review of apportionment a fortiori make impossible a court's consideration of these imponderables as an original matter. And the choice of elections at large as opposed to elections by district, however unequal the districts, is a matter of sweeping political judgment having enormous political implications, the nature and reach of which are certainly beyond the informed understanding of, and capacity for appraisal by, courts.

In Tennessee, moreover, the McCanless case has closed off several among even these unsatisfactory and dangerous modes of relief. That case was a suit in the state courts attacking the 1901 Reapportionment Act and seeking a declaration and an injunction of the Act's enforcement or, alternatively, a writ of mandamus compelling state election officials to hold the elections at large, or, again alternatively, a decree of the court reapportioning the State. The Chancellor denied all coercive relief, but entertained the suit for the purpose of rendering a declaratory judgment. It was his view that despite an invalidation of the statute under which the present legislature was elected, that body would continue to possess de facto authority to reapportion, and that therefore the maintaining of the suit did not threaten the disruption of the government. The Tennessee Supreme Court agreed that no coercive relief could be granted; in particular, it said, "There is no provision of law for election of our General Assembly by an election at large over the State." 200 Tenn., at 277, 292 S. W. 2d, at 42. Thus, a legislature elected at [369 U.S. 186, 329] large would not be the legally constituted legislative authority of the State. The court reversed, however, the Chancellor's determination to give declaratory relief, holding that the ground of demurrer which asserted that a striking down of the statute would disrupt the orderly process of government should have been sustained:

"(4) It seems obvious and we therefore hold that if the Act of 1901 is to be declared unconstitutional, then the de facto doctrine cannot be applied to maintain the present members of the General Assembly in office. If the Chancellor is correct in holding that this statute has expired by the passage of the decade following its enactment then for the same reason all prior apportionment acts have expired by a like lapse of time and are non-existent. Therefore we would not only not have any existing members of the General Assembly but we would have no apportionment act whatever under which a new election could be held for the election of members to the General Assembly.

. . . . .

"The ultimate result of holding this Act unconstitutional by reason of the lapse of time would be to deprive us of the present Legislature and the means of electing a new one and ultimately bring about the destruction of the State itself." 200 Tenn., at 281-282, 292 S. W. 2d, at 44.

A federal court enforcing the Federal Constitution is not, to be sure, bound by the remedial doctrines of the state courts. But it must consider as pertinent to the propriety or impropriety of exercising its jurisdiction those state-law effects of its decree which it cannot itself control. A federal court cannot provide the authority requisite to make a legislature the proper governing body of the State of Tennessee. And it cannot be doubted that the striking [369 U.S. 186, 330] down of the statute here challenged on equal protection grounds, no less than on grounds of failure to reapportion decennially, would deprive the State of all valid apportionment legislation and - under the ruling in McCanless - deprive the State of an effective law-based legislative branch. Just such considerations, among others here present, were determinative in Luther v. Borden and the Oregon initiative cases. 152

Although the District Court had jurisdiction in the very restricted sense of power to determine whether it could adjudicate the claim, the case is of that class of political controversy which, by the nature of its subject, is unfit for federal judicial action. The judgment of the District Court, in dismissing the complaint for failure to state a claim on which relief can be granted, should therefore be affirmed.

Justice Frankfurter on the meaning of due process of law

Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v

Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath

341 U.S. 123 (1951)

Justice Frankfurter’s concurring opinion discussing the meaning of due process:

The requirement of "due process" is not a fair-weather or timid assurance. It must be respected in periods of calm and in times of trouble; it protects aliens as well as citizens. But "due process," unlike some legal rules, is not a technical conception with a fixed content unrelated to time, place and circumstances. Expressing as it does in its ultimate analysis respect enforced by law for that feeling of just treatment which has been evolved through centuries of Anglo-American constitutional history and civilization, "due process" cannot be imprisoned within the treacherous limits of any formula. Representing a profound attitude of fairness between man and man, and more particularly between the individual and government, "due process" is compounded of history, [341 U.S. 123, 163] reason, the past course of decisions, and stout confidence in the strength of the democratic faith which we profess. Due process is not a mechanical instrument. It is not a yardstick. It is a process. It is a delicate process of adjustment inescapably involving the exercise of judgment by those whom the Constitution entrusted with the unfolding of the process.

Fully aware of the enormous powers thus given to the judiciary and especially to its Supreme Court, those who founded this Nation put their trust in a judiciary truly independent - in judges not subject to the fears or allurements of a limited tenure and by the very nature of their function detached from passing and partisan influences.

It may fairly be said that, barring only occasional and temporary lapses, this Court has not sought unduly to confine those who have the responsibility of governing by giving the great concept of due process doctrinaire scope. The Court has responded to the infinite variety and perplexity of the tasks of government by recognizing that what is unfair in one situation may be fair in another. Compare, for instance, Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co., 18 How. 272, with Ng Fung Ho v. White, 259 U.S. 276 , and see Communications Comm'n v. WJR, 337 U.S. 265, 275 . Whether the ex parte procedure to which the petitioners were subjected duly observed "the rudiments of fair play," Chicago, M. & St. P. R. Co. v. Polt, 232 U.S. 165, 168 , cannot, therefore, be tested by mere generalities or sentiments abstractly appealing. The precise nature of the interest that has been adversely affected, the manner in which this was done, the reasons for doing it, the available alternatives to the procedure that was followed, the protection implicit in the office of the functionary whose conduct is challenged, the balance of hurt complained of and good accomplished - these are some of the considerations that must enter into the judicial judgment

DEN EX DEM

MURRAY'S LESSEE v. HOBOKEN LAND & IMP. CO.
59 U.S. 272 (1855)

Mr. Justice CURTIS delivered the opinion of the court.

…Tested by the common and statute law of England prior to the emigration of our ancestors, and by the laws of many of the States at the time of the adoption of this amendment, the proceedings authorized by the act of 1820 cannot be denied to be due process of law, when applied to the ascertainment and recovery of balances due to the government from a collector of customs, unless there exists in the constitution some other provision which restrains congress from authorizing such proceedings. For, though 'due process of law' generally implies and includes actor, reus, judex, regular allegations, opportunity to answer, and a trial according to some settled course of judicial proceedings, (2 Inst. 47, 50; Hoke v. Henderson, 4 Dev. N. C. Rep. 15; Taylor v. Porter, 4 Hill, 146; Van Zandt v. Waddel, 2 Yerger, 260; State Bank v. Cooper, Ibid. 599; Jones's Heirs v. Perry, 10 Ibid. 59; Greene v. Briggs, 1 Curtis, 311,) yet, this is not universally true. There may be, and we have seen that there are cases, under the law of England after Magna Charta, and as it was brought to this country and acted on here, in which process, in its nature final, issues against the body, lands, and goods of certain public debtors without any such trial; and this brings us to the question, whether those provisions of the constitution which relate to the judicial power are incompatible with these proceedings?

That the auditing of the accounts of a receiver of public moneys may be, in an enlarged sense, a judicial act, must be admitted. So are all those administrative duties the performance of which involves an inquiry into the existence of facts and the application to them of rules of law. In this sense the act of the President in calling out the militia under the act of 1795, 12 Wheat. 19, or of a commissioner who makes a certificate for the extradition of a criminal, under a treaty, is judicial. But it is not sufficient to bring such matters under the judicial power, that they involve the exercise of judgment upon law and fact. United States v. Ferreira, 13 How. 40. It is necessary to go further, and show not only that the adjustment of the balances due from accounting officers may be, but from their nature must be, controversies to which the United States is a party, within the meaning of the second section of the third article of the constitution. We do not doubt the power of congress to provide by law that such a question shall form the subject-matter of a suit in which the judicial power can be exerted. The act of 1820 makes such a provision for reviewing the decision of the accounting officers of the treasury. But, until reviewed, it is final and binding; and the question is, whether its subject-matter is necessarily, and without regard to the consent of congress, a judicial controversy. And we are of opinion it is not.

Among the legislative powers of congress are the powers 'to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; to pay the debts, and provide for the common defence and welfare of the United States, to raise and support armies; to provide and maintain a navy, and to make all laws which may be necessary and proper for carrying into execution those powers.' What officers should be appointed to collect the revenue thus authorized to be raised, and to disburse it in payment of the debts of the United States; what duties should be required of them; when and how, and to whom they should account, and what security they should furnish, and to what remedies they should be subjected to enforce the proper discharge of their duties, congress was to determine. In the exercise of their powers, they have required collectors of customs to be appointed; made it incumbent on them to account, from time to time, with certain officers of the treasury department, and to furnish sureties, by bond, for the payment of all balances of the public money which may become due from them. And by the act of 1820, now in question, they have undertaken to provide summary means to compel these officers-and in case of their default, their sureties-to pay such balances of the public money as may be in their hands. …

To avoid misconstruction upon so grave a subject, we think it proper to state that we do not consider congress can either withdraw from judicial cognizance any matter which, from its nature, is the subject of a suit at the common law, or in equity, or admiralty; nor, on the other hand, can it bring under the judicial power a matter which, from its nature, is not a subject for judicial determination. At the same time there are matters, involving public rights, which may be presented in such form that the judicial power is capable of acting on them, and which are susceptible of judicial determination, but which congress may or may not bring within the cognizance of the courts of the United States, as it may deem proper. Equitable claims to land by the inhabitants of ceded territories form a striking instance of such a class of cases; and as it depends upon the will of congress whether a remedy in the courts shall be allowed at all, in such cases, they may regulate it and prescribe such rules of determination as they may think just and needful. Thus it has been repeatedly decided in this class of cases, that upon their trial the acts of executive officers, done under the authority of congress, were conclusive, either upon particular facts involved in the inquiry or upon the whole title. Foley v. Harrison, 15 How. 433;…

The First Amendment Establishment Clause

William Cohen and John Kaplan

Bill of Rights: Constitutional Law for Undergraduates

(New York: Foundation Press, 1976)

pp. 379-380

FREEDOM OF RELIGION

Chapter XII

HISTORY AND RATIONALE OF THE RELIGION CLAUSES OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT
HISTORY OF THE RELIGION CLAUSES
THE SITUATION AT THE TIME THE CONSTITUTION WAS ADOPTED * Strictly speaking, the American experiment of freedom and separation was not established in the First Amendment command that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." That experiment had been launched four years earlier, when the founders of the republic carefully withheld from the new national government any power to deal with religion. As Madison said, the national government had no "jurisdiction" over religion or any "shadow of right to intermeddle" with it.
The First Amendment, then, did not take away or abridge any power of the national government; its intent was to make express the absence of power. The historian George Bancroft, in a letter to Philip stated:
Congress from the beginning was as much without the power to make a law respecting the establishment of religion as it is now that the amendment has passed. [The situation however was very different in the states.]

[*Leo Pfeffer, Church State and Freedom, pp. 106, 115. Copyright 1953 by the Beacon Press/Copyright @ 1967

by Leo Pfeffer/Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press. ]

The relationship of religion to government in the original state constitutions or organic laws at the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution may be summarized as fellows:

Two out of thirteen, Virginia and Rhode Island, conceded full freedom;

One, New York, gave full freedom except for requiring naturalized citizens to abjure foreign allegiance and subjection in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil;

Six, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, Georgia, North and South Carolina, adhered to religious estab- lishments;

Two, Delaware and Maryland, demanded Christianity;

Four, Pennsylvania, De1aware, North and South Carolina, required assent to the divine inspiration of the Bible;

Two, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, imposed a belief in heaven and hell;

Three, New York, Delaware, and South Carolina, excluded ministers from civil office;

Four, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, excluded ministers from the legislature;

Two, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, emphasized belief in one eternal God;

One, Delaware, required assent to the doctrine of the Trinity;

Five, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, and South Carolina, insisted on Protestantism;

One, South Carolina, still referred to religious "toleration.

Constitutional Law Case Notes

Judicial Review

DICKERSON v. UNITED STATES
United States Supreme Court (2000)

BACKGROUNDER ON THE BRANDEIS BRIEF AND THE SUPREME COURT OPINION IN THE MULLER V. OREGON CASE

MULLER V. OREGON (1908)

I

II

A

III

UNITED STATES v. MORRISON et al.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

Eight Amendment Jurisprudence

STATE OF LA. EX REL. FRANCIS v. RESWEBER, 329 U.S. 459 (1947)

FORD v. WAINWRIGHT, 477 U.S. 399 (1986)

Baker v. Carr (1962), Frankfurter dissent on Political Question doctrine

I.

II.

III.

IV.

Justice Frankfurter on the meaning of due process of law

MURRAY'S LESSEE v. HOBOKEN LAND & IMP. CO.
59 U.S. 272 (1855)

Constitutional Law Case Notes

Judicial Review

DICKERSON v. UNITED STATES United States Supreme Court (2000)

BACKGROUNDER ON THE BRANDEIS BRIEF AND THE SUPREME COURT OPINION IN THE MULLER V. OREGON CASE

MULLER V. OREGON (1908)

I

II

A

III

UNITED STATES v. MORRISON et al.

CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

Eight Amendment Jurisprudence

STATE OF LA. EX REL. FRANCIS v. RESWEBER, 329 U.S. 459 (1947)

FORD v. WAINWRIGHT, 477 U.S. 399 (1986)

Baker v. Carr (1962), Frankfurter dissent on Political Question doctrine

I.

II.

III.

IV.

Justice Frankfurter on the meaning of due process of law

MURRAY'S LESSEE v. HOBOKEN LAND & IMP. CO. 59 U.S. 272 (1855)

DICKERSON v. UNITED STATES
United States Supreme Court (2000)

MURRAY'S LESSEE v. HOBOKEN LAND & IMP. CO.
59 U.S. 272 (1855)