Cite as: 517 U. S. 899 (1996)
Stevens, J., dissenting
Although I do not believe a judicial inquiry into "narrow tailoring" is either necessary or appropriate in these cases, the foregoing discussion reveals that the "narrow tailoring" requirement that the Court has fashioned is a pure judicial invention that unfairly deprives the legislature of a sovereign State of its traditional discretion in determining the boundaries of its electoral districts.23 The Court's analysis gives rise to the unfortunate suggestion that a State that fears a § 2 lawsuit must draw the precise district that it believes a federal court would have the power to impose. Such a proposition confounds basic principles of federalism, and forces States to imagine the legally "correct" outcome of a lawsuit that has not even been filed.
The proposition is also at odds with the course of the litigation that led to Gingles itself. In that case, the plaintiffs proposed a number of oddly configured majority-minority districts to prove their vote dilution claim. In implementing a remedy for the § 2 violation, the federal court wisely permitted North Carolina to propose its own remedial districts, many of which were highly irregular in dimension. Indeed, so peculiar were some of the shapes concocted by the State that the Gingles plaintiffs challenged them on the grounds that they constituted racial gerrymanders which failed to remedy the very violations that had given rise to the need for their creation, and that they reflected only grudging responses designed to protect incumbent office-holders. Gingles v. Edmisten, 590 F. Supp., at 381.
Although the District Court in Gingles acknowledged that the State's plan was not the one that it would have implemented, it nonetheless concluded that the plan constituted a reasonable exercise of state legislative judgment. "[A] state legislature's primary jurisdiction for legislative apportion-23 That judicial creativity rather than constitutional principle defines the narrowing tailoring requirement in this area of our law is clear from Bush's quite different analysis of the same question. See Bush, post, at 977.
949
Page: Index Previous 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007