Fair districting started here

As state legislatures set about redrawing congressional and legislative district lines to reflect the 2010 census, they must conform to the Supreme Court’s equal-population rule that we now take for granted. But until the mid-20th century the courts gladly left districting to the politicians.

What overcame their reluctance? It was the unfairness of a huge Cook County congressional district, the most populous in the entire country, encompassing part of Chicago and nine Northwest suburban townships.

Peter J. Chamales, a lawyer from Barrington, reasoned that his vote in that mammoth 7th Congressional District, encompassing 914,000 residents, was worth less than a vote in the smallest district in Illinois (and in the nation), a rural district with only 112,000 residents.

So Chamales teamed up with two professors to file a novel lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Chicago, challenging the constitutionality of the disparate districts.

They lost. The court ruled that it had no jurisdiction to consider such a complaint, and the Supreme Court, in 1946, agreed. Or did it?

Fast forward to 1962. The case was Baker v. Carr, still remembered as monumental. A federal court in Tennessee had declined to hear a similar complaint by urban voters, this one concerning inequitable legislative districts, declaring that dismissal was required by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Cook County case.

Whoa! Not so, said a unanimous Supreme Court. “Appellees misconceive the holding of that case,” Justice William Brennan wrote for the court. “The holding was precisely contrary to their reading of it . . . Two of the opinions expressing the views of four of the justices, a majority, flatly held that there was jurisdiction of the subject matter.”

The court went on in subsequent cases to require population equality in both legislative and congressional districts in each state.

It all started here.

Joe Mathewson

Journalism instructor

Northwestern University

Evanston