Baker v. Carr and Its Continuing Impact on American Law

In other words, a " governmental point." Indeed, courts had long dismissed such cases as "political questions." But Baker would change that.

The Political Question article of faith has been defined differently throughout the Supreme judicial system's history. Justice marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803) differentiated between matters of national policy, where the death chair and Congress are only accountable to the voters, and the infringement of singular rights, a claim that federal courts must always strain. However, the pillowcase of relief the Court can order is limited to the individual. That became garner in Pacific secernates Tel. & Tel. Co. v. Oregon, a 1912 case in which the justices were asked to umpire a battle between competing state governments in Oregon.

The plaintiffs in that case invoked the Guaranty Clause, which provides that the "United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republic Form of Government[.]" The Court found this dispute to be a political question beyond its competence. The only issue the Court could pass judging on was whether the government had violated individual rights, and if so, then those individuals would be entitled to relief. General relief i.e., declaring which government was the legitimate main(a) of Oregon was not an option.

The justices use that rationale in Colegrove v. Green (1946), where they refused to order the reallocatement of other state's pick out districts. The justices declared that they lacked the remedial power to reapportion voting districts, and that the organisation clearly granted that authority to Congress. "Courts ought not to lay this political thicket," Justice Frankfurter wrote. The District Court in Baker followed that logic precisely, declaring that "[i]t has long been recognized and is accepted dogma that there are indeed some rights guaranteed by the Constitution for the violation of which the courts cannot give redress."

Chemerinsky, Erwin. Federal Jurisdiction. Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown and Company, 1989.

Thus, Brennan achieved his destination of bringing many another(prenominal) more cases to the courts, especially those tough cases that previously escaped adjudication because a remedy would be too hard-fought to fashion. Large class-action lawsuits, which likely would commit been dismissed before, warranted full hearings and very much large-scale relief. Without Baker, cases such as Goldberg v. Kelly (1970) might not have ever reached a courtroom.

The result of that interpretation is that the Court refused to hear entire classes of cases because they were "political." This provided an opening for opponents of the Warren Court's decisions, who were desperately trying to table the Court's orders to end segregation. Those opponents quickly recognized that they could avoid the Court's mandates by making racial discrimination a political question. For example, Tennessee did not reapportion its voting districts in large part to minimize the votes of African-Americans, many of whom were urban residents. The Political Question Doctrine threatened to tease apart much of the justices' work.

hts how the Court defined political questions. As kindred (99) writes, "[a]n issue is political not because it is one of particular chafe to the political branches of g
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