Miller v. Johnson
1995 United States Supreme Court case
Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900 (1995), was a United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of racial gerrymandering in which the Court held that "direct evidence" of legislative purpose could demonstrate a racial motive supporting a claim under Shaw v. Reno.
Background
In 1993 the United States Supreme Court ruled that redistricting that separated voters based on race and could not be explained by traditional districting criteria could be challenged. Laws that classify by race, including those that appear neutral but can only be explained by race, can be upheld if they serve a compelling state interest and are narrowly tailored to serve that interest. These equal protection principles apply to the drawing of congressional districts.
Since 1965, Georgia had been subject to preclearance requirements under the Voting Rights Act to protect the Fifteenth Amendment rights of voters in that state. Georgia had ten congressional districts after the 1980 census; one of those districts was a majority-black district. According to the 1990 census, Georgia's increase in population entitled the state to an eleventh congressional seat. After the Justice Department denied several of the Assembly's proposed new districts, which placed non-black minority voters in a majority-black district, and did not maximize the number of majority-black districts, the Assembly drew the Eleventh District to create three majority-black districts.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Miller v. Johnson” as 1995 United States Supreme Court case. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15147983. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995, 1993, 1965 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Miller v. Johnson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.