Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that redistricting qualifies as a justiciable question under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thus enabling federal courts to hear Fourteenth Amendment-based redistricting cases. The court summarized its Baker holding in a later decision as follows: "Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the authority of a State Legislature in designing the geographical districts from which representatives are chosen either for the State Legislature or for the Federal House of Representatives." (Gray v. Sanders, ). The court had previously held in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that districting claims over racial discrimination could be brought under the Fifteenth Amendment. The case arose from a lawsuit against the state of Tennessee, which had not conducted redistricting since 1901. The state of Tennessee argued that the composition of legislative districts constituted a nonjusticiable political question, as the U.S. Supreme Court had held in Colegrove v. Green (1946). In a majority opinion joined by five other justices, Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr. held that redistricting did not qualify as a political question, though he remanded the case to the federal district court for further proceedings. Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter strongly dissented, arguing that the Court's decision cast aside history and judicial restraint and violated the separation of powers between legislatures and courts. The case did not have any immediate effect on electoral districts, but it set an important precedent regarding the power of federal courts to address redistricting. In 1964, the Supreme Court would hand down two cases, Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims, which required the United States House of Representatives and state legislatures to establish electoral districts of equal population on the principle of one person, one vote. Background Plaintiff Charles Baker was a Republican who lived in Shelby County, Tennessee, and had served as the mayor of Millington, Tennessee, near Memphis. The Tennessee State Constitution required that legislative districts for the Tennessee General Assembly be redrawn every ten years to provide for districts of substantially equal population (as was to be done for congressional districts). Baker's complaint was that Tennessee had not redistricted since 1901, in response to the 1900 census. By the time of Baker's lawsuit, the population had shifted such that his district in Shelby County had about ten times as many residents as some