What the Supreme Court's gerrymandering ruling means

By Rebecca Kirkman on June 27, 2019

The Supreme Court of the United States delivered a 5-4 decision Thursday, ruling federal courts do not have a place in determining how state electoral districts are drawn.

The decision included a case from Maryland where Republicans had challenged alleged gerrymandering in the state.

Towson University lecturer Jonathan Hensley, who has expertise in Constitutional Law, the American judicial system and the Supreme Court, was eagerly anticipating the decision. Hensley shared what the gerrymandering decision could mean going forward.

What does the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of two constitutional challenges to partisan gerrymandering mean?

The court’s majority opinion [by Chief Justice John Roberts] said that partisan gerrymanders are what courts call not justiciable, that means it’s something that a court can not remedy. So it essentially means that the federal court will not be able to hear challenges to gerrymanders based on partisan gerrymandering. They could hear other types of gerrymandering claims, however, but not ones based on partisanship.

State courts could still decide to hear these kinds of claims.

It was was a 5-4 decision. Is this the outcome that was expected?

This is the outcome that I expected, and I think a lot of Supreme Court observers expected it. In general the court’s conservative justices have been less wiling to consider partisan gerrymandering complaints. I don’t think the 5-4 split was a big surprise. Especially now that Justice Kennedy is retired—he was the one more conservative justice that had shown some willingness to consider partisan gerrymandering complaints, but now that he’s retired it’s not a big surprise that it came out this way.

When and how could we see the impact of this ruling?

One impact that we’re already seeing is that any partisan gerrymanders are likely to remain in place for a while. I think certainly after the 2020 census when states redistrict, we’ll see the impacts play out then, because parties will feel like they have a green light to engage in partisan gerrymandering.

Other implications are that any groups that are interested in fighting partisan gerrymandering are going to have to take the fight somewhere other than federal courts, be that state courts or the legislative process.