Cite as: 517 U. S. 952 (1996)
Souter, J., dissenting
decision not to rehire him; employer's burden to show that it would have made same decision "even in the absence of the protected conduct"); Hunter v. Underwood, 471 U. S. 222, 228 (1985) ("Once racial discrimination is shown to have been a 'substantial' or 'motivating' factor behind the enactment of the law, the burden shifts to the law's defenders to demonstrate that the law would have been enacted without this factor"); but see Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U. S. 252, 265 (1977) ("Rarely can it be said that a legislature or administrative body operating under a broad mandate made a decision motivated solely by a single concern, or even that a particular purpose was the 'dominant' or 'primary' one"). At first glance, then, it may not seem entirely out of the question for courts to sort out the strands in Shaw cases. But even this cool comfort would be misplaced.
While a court may be entitled to some confidence that in most cases it will be able, for example, to distinguish the relative strength of an employer's dissatisfaction with an employee's job performance from his displeasure over a worker's union membership, see NLRB v. Transportation Management Corp., 462 U. S. 393, 403-405 (1983), such confidence would be unwarranted in the districting context. It is not merely that the very nature of districting decisions makes it difficult to identify whether any particular consideration, racial or otherwise, was the "predominant motive," though that is certainly true:
"Districting plans are integrated bundles of compromises, deals and principles. To ask about the reason behind the design of any one particular district is typically to implicate the entire pattern of purposes and trade-offs behind a districting plan as a whole. Searching for 'the reason' or 'the dominant reason' behind a particular district's shape is often like asking why one year's federal budget is at one level rather than another. Moreover, to require a coherent explanation for the spe-
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