Cite as: 517 U. S. 899 (1996)
Stevens, J., dissenting
the existence of such injuries to the degree that we normally require at this stage of the litigation. See Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555 (1992). Thus, so long as the Court insists on treating this type of suit as a traditional equal protection claim, it must either mean to take a broader view of the power of federal courts to entertain challenges to race-based governmental action than it has heretofore adopted, see Allen v. Wright, 468 U. S. 737 (1984); cf. Palmer, 403 U. S., at 224-225, or to create a special exception to general jurisdictional limitations for plaintiffs such as those before us here. Suffice it to say, I charitably assume the former to be the case, and proceed to consider the merits on the assumption that Shaw I was correctly decided.
II
The District Court concluded that Shaw I required the application of strict scrutiny in any case containing proof that "racial considerations played a 'substantial' or 'motivating' role in the line-drawing process, even if they were not the only factor that influenced that process." 861 F. Supp., at 431. The court acknowledged that under this standard any deliberate effort to draw majority-minority districts in conformity with the Voting Rights Act would attract the strictest constitutional review, regardless of whether race-neutral districting criteria were also considered. Id., at 429. As a consequence, it applied strict scrutiny in this case solely on the basis of North Carolina's concession that it sought to draw two majority-minority districts in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and without performing any inquiry into whether North Carolina had considered race-neutral districting criteria in drawing District 12's boundaries.
As the majority concludes, the District Court's test for triggering strict scrutiny set too low a threshold for subjecting a State's districting effort to rigorous, if not fatal, constitutional review. Ante, at 905. In my view, therefore, the Court should at the very least remand the case to allow
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