Shaw v. Reno and North Carolina's Twelfth Congressional District : testing the constitutionality of a majority-minority district

During the early 1990s, the United States Department of Justice under provisions of the Voting Rights Act directed several states across the country, primarily in the South, to create majority-minority Congressional districts. A majority-minority electoral district is one in which a minority group (African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans) constitutes a majority of the population. Most of the federally mandated districts contain African American majorities. North Carolina's Twelfth was one of the newly created majority-minority districts. Shortly after its creation, a group of white citizens filed a complaint in federal district court claiming that the Twelfth District was excessively gerrymandered and should be declared unconstitutional. This case, Shaw v. Reno, eventually was appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The Court's decision, released in the summer of 1993, did not declare the Twelfth District to be illegal. Instead, it created new rules regarding what is legal in redistricting and remanded the case to federal district court for further proceedings in light of the decision in Shaw. This thesis argues that North Carolina's Twelfth Congressional District is legal in the aftermath of Shaw v. Reno. To prove the legality, the project is divided into three parts. First, the origins of the demand for majority-minority districts and the subsequent backlash that culminated in Shaw v. Reno are explained. Next, a methodology for testing the constitutionality of a Congressional district is developed from pertinent legal holdings and academic literature. Finally the methodology is applied to the Twelfth District. The analysis compares North Carolina's Twelfth with four groups of Congressional districts. The study reveals that while the Twelfth has faults, they are neither more common or intense than those of other districts.