From Reynolds v. Sims to City of Mobile v. Bolden: Have the White Suburbs Commandeered the Fifteenth Amendment

In 1964, the United States Supreme Court held that the fourteenth amendment requires state legislatures to apportion themselves by population. The new constitutional rule of one person, one vote set forth in Reynolds v. Sims was derived largely from decisions prohibiting racial discrimination in voting under the fifteenth amendment. In decisions following Reynolds, the Court recognized that the one-person, one-vote standard could be satisfied by creation of multimember districts or at-large voting plans that would be likely to disadvantage racial minorities. This Article traces the development of the problem of minority vote dilution and the Court\u27s attempts to articulate standards governing such cases. Particular attention is given to City of Mobile v. Bolden, where a plurality opinion held that black voters must prove an at-large voting plan was motivated by invidious purpose, and Rogers Y. Lodge, in which a majority of the Court approved the Bolden plurality\u27s intent requirement. The Article concludes that the Court\u27s enunciation of a higher standard of proof in cases involving racial vote dilution than that required to challenge population malapportionment has created an intolerable inversion of historical and constitutional priorities. In addition, the Article concludes that none of the standards proposed by various members of the Court would provide the necessary judicial manageability, and proposes a manageable standard of proof that reconciles the implied constitutional right of majority rule with the explicit constitutional demand for the protection of racial groups

Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Volume 1 of 2 (Petition with Appendix Pages 1a-563a). Lynch v. Alabama, 135 S. Ct. 53 (2014) (No. 13-1232), 2014 U.S. LEXIS 5672

QUESTIONS PRESENTED (1) The district court found that several provisions of the Alabama Constitution of 1901 were adopted for the purpose of limiting the imposition on whites of property taxes that would pay for the education of black public school students. The first question presented is: Do black public school children and their parents have standing to challenge the validity under the Equal Protection Clause of state constitutional provisions adopted for the purpose of limiting the imposition on whites of property taxes that would be used to educate black public school students? (2) In 2004 the District Judge in Knight v. Alabama held that certain aspects of Amendments 325 and 373 to the Alabama Constitution were adopted for racially discriminatory reasons. In 2011 the District Judge in the instant case, applying different legal standards, concluded that the Amendments were enacted for a nondiscriminatory purpose. The second question presented is: Which district judge applied the correct constitutional standard? (3) The district court in the instant case found that prior to 1971 real property in Alabama was assessed far below its fair market value, and that the primar[y] reason for those low assessments was to protect white landowners from paying property taxes that would be used to educate black public school students. After 1971 Alabama adopted two constitutional amendments whose purpose, the court of appeals recognized, was to entrench those race-based pre-1971 assessments. The third question presented is: Is the Equal Protection Clause violated by a state constitutional amendment adopted for the purpose of entrenching pre-existing race-based property tax assessments

Brief for Appellants. Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, 135 S.Ct. 1257 (2015) (No. 13-895), 2014 WL 4059779

QUESTION PRESENTED Whether Alabama’s legislative redistricting plans unconstitutionally classify black voters by race by intentionally packing them in districts designed to maintain supermajority percentages produced when 2010 census data are applied to the 2001 majority-black districts