Brown et al. v. Thomson, Secretary of State of Wyoming, et al. (462 U.S. 835)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 22, 1983 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 462 U.S. 835 · 103 S. Ct. 2690
- Decided
- June 22, 1983
- Term
- October Term 1982
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Powell
- Issue area
- Civil Rights
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Powell delivered the opinion of the Court. The issue is whether the State of Wyoming violated the Equal Protection Clause by allocating one of the 64 seats in its House of Representatives to a county the population of which is considerably lower than the average population per state representative. I Since Wyoming became a State in 1890, its legislature has consisted of a Senate and a House of Representatives. The State’s Constitution provides that each of the State’s counties “shall constitute a senatorial and representative district” and that “[e]ach county shall have at least one senator and one representative.” The senators and representatives are required to be “apportioned among the said counties as nearly as may be according to the number of their inhabitants.” Wyo. Const., Art. 3, §3. The State has had 23 counties since 1922. Because the apportionment of the Wyoming House has been challenged three times in the past 20 years, some background is helpful. In 1963 voters from the six most populous counties filed suit in the District Court for the District of Wyoming challenging the apportionment of the State’s 25 senators and 61 representatives. The three-judge District Court held that the apportionment of the Senate — one senator allocated to each of the State’s 23 counties, with the two largest counties having two senators — so far departed from the principle of…
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