Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 29 (1995)

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928

MILLER v. JOHNSON

O'Connor, J., concurring

unauthorized view of the Voting Rights Act to invoke that statute, which has played a decisive role in redressing some of our worst forms of discrimination, to demand the very racial stereotyping the Fourteenth Amendment forbids.

* * *

The judgment of the District Court is affirmed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this decision.

It is so ordered.

[Appendices A and B, containing a map of Georgia congressional districts and a population density map of the 11th Congressional District of Georgia, follow this page.]

Justice O'Connor, concurring.

I understand the threshold standard the Court adopts— that "the legislature subordinated traditional race-neutral districting principles . . . to racial considerations," ante, at 916—to be a demanding one. To invoke strict scrutiny, a plaintiff must show that the State has relied on race in substantial disregard of customary and traditional districting practices. Those practices provide a crucial frame of reference and therefore constitute a significant governing principle in cases of this kind. The standard would be no different if a legislature had drawn the boundaries to favor some other ethnic group; certainly the standard does not treat efforts to create majority-minority districts less favorably than similar efforts on behalf of other groups. Indeed, the driving force behind the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment was the desire to end legal discrimination against blacks.

Application of the Court's standard does not throw into doubt the vast majority of the Nation's 435 congressional districts, where presumably the States have drawn the boundaries in accordance with their customary districting principles. That is so even though race may well have been

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