CASE SUMMARY

When Virginia’s 2011 legislative redistricting plan was challenged as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander (Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections (2017)), Virginia’s House of Delegates and the Virginia House Speaker intervened as defendants and participated in the case’s first bench trial, its appeal, and the second bench trial on remand. After the second trial, the federal district court struck down the plan as unconstitutional and gave the General Assembly several months to adopt a remedial plan.

Virginia’s Attorney General, representing the State, opted not to appeal the district court’s decision, but the Intervenor-House-Defendants filed their own appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court which the State asked to be dismissed for lack of standing. The Intervenor-Defendants asserted two possible theories of standing: one based on representing the interests of the State, and one based on representing the interests of the Virginia House of Delegates itself.

  • On June 17, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court held the Intervenor-House-Defendants lacked standing to appeal the lower court’s decision on their own. In rejecting their first standing theory, the Court explained Virginia law vests the Attorney General with the sole authority to represent the state’s interests in litigation and at no point did the Attorney General authorize the House of Delegates to represent those interests here. As for the second theory, the Court explained the judicial invalidation of a state’s law on constitutional grounds has never been held to inflict a judicially cognizable injury for standing purposes on every governmental body involved in its passing. Finally, the Court emphasized that, unlike here, prior cases allowing a state legislature to pursue an appeal on their own involved both chambers acting in unison to represent the legislature’s interests as a whole.

Significance: (1) One chamber of a bicameral state legislature does not have standing to appeal the invalidation of a redistricting plan on its own when the State of which it is a part has declined to do so; (2) The invalidation of a state's legislatively enacted redistricting plan does not constitute a judicially cognizable injury upon the state's legislature which enacted it.

CASE LIBRARY

U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Richmond Division - 3:14-cv-00852

U.S. Supreme Court - Nos. 18-281; 18A629 [139 S.Ct. 1945]