S v Zinn

S v Zinn refers to the United States Supreme Court case Schneck v. Zinn, 342 U.S. 951 (1952). This was a per curiam decision, meaning it was a brief ruling issued by the Court acting collectively, rather than a decision authored by a single justice.

The case concerned a challenge to a Wisconsin law that divided the state into congressional districts. The plaintiffs, including Schneck, argued that the redistricting violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution by creating congressional districts that were not substantially equal in population. They claimed that some districts were intentionally drawn to be more populous than others, thereby diluting the voting power of residents in the larger districts.

The Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which had upheld the constitutionality of the state's redistricting plan. The Supreme Court's per curiam decision provided minimal explanation, offering no detailed reasoning for its affirmance. This lack of explanation makes it difficult to definitively determine the Court's rationale. However, the decision is understood to have upheld the state’s power to draw congressional district lines, even if population disparities existed, provided such disparities were not so extreme as to constitute invidious discrimination.

The case is significant because it touched upon the issue of malapportionment and the principle of "one person, one vote," which would later become a central focus of the Court's jurisprudence in subsequent redistricting cases like Baker v. Carr (1962) and Wesberry v. Sanders (1964). While Schneck v. Zinn pre-dated these landmark cases and its direct impact was limited due to the lack of a written opinion, it represented an early challenge to unequal representation based on population disparities in congressional districts.