Politics and the judiciary 215Court recognised the difference between de jure segregation and de facto
segregation, that is the difference between segregation required by state
law, which is unconstitutional, and segregation resulting from the fact that
different communities choose to live in different areas. In Freeman v. Pitts in
1992 the Court decided that, provided the school district had done all that
it could to end deliberate discrimination according to law, ‘Once the racial
imbalance due to the de jure violation has been remedied, the school district
is under no duty to remedy imbalance that is caused by demographic factors.’
Although ‘forced busing’ still continues in some areas, its impact has been
greatly reduced.
Baker v. Carr, 1962
Few cases decided by the Court have had such far-reaching political implica-
tions as that of Baker v. Carr. As we saw in Chapter 4, the state legislatures,
which control their electoral law and also provide the framework of the fed-
eral electoral system, had allowed themselves to become unrepresentative
because of the wide disparities in the sizes of the electoral districts in many
states. Usually far greater weight was given to rural areas than was justified
on a population basis. The gerrymandering of district boundaries in order to
gain party advantage had reached the point where, in the words of Justice
Clark, the apportionment of state legislatures had produced ‘a crazy quilt
without rational basis.’ Because these unrepresentative state legislatures
also determined the boundaries of federal congressional districts, a similar,
though less extreme, misrepresentation was to be found at the federal level.
The entrenchment of rural interests had been challenged in the courts on a
number of occasions before 1962, but the Supreme Court had avoided ruling
on the matter. In 1946, in Colegrove v. Green, a majority of the Court refused to
interfere in the way in which the state of Illinois had drawn the boundaries of
the congressional districts within the state, although the largest district con-
tained over eight times as many people as the smallest. The majority on the
Court was not agreed on the reasons why it refused to deal with this problem,
but Justice Frankfurter argued that ‘Courts ought not to enter this political
thicket.’ Frankfurter pointed out that legislative apportionment is heavily
‘embroiled in politics, in the sense of party contests and party interests.’ He
concluded that this was a problem best left to the executive and legislative
branches to deal with, subject to the vigilance of the people in the exercise of
their political rights. The Court had always declined to interfere in a rather
miscellaneous collection of ‘political questions’ involving for the most part
matters concerning foreign affairs, or international boundaries or disputes.
The labelling of a question as ‘political’ did not mean, of course, that the
Court normally avoided a problem just because it was controversial. This
would rule out most of the Court’s constitutional business, but Justice Frank-
furter maintained that legislative apportionment was a question in which the