John Marshall Harlan II

“ The features of this system are surely sensibly designed to facilitate creation of new educational bodies while guaranteeing to small school districts that they will not be entirely swallowed up by a large partner. The small districts are free to avoid alliance with a highly populated neighbor, if they prefer to link with enough others of their own size to provide a viable base for a junior college. At the same time, a very large school district is probably capable of forming a junior college on its own if it prefers not to consolidate, on the terms set by statute, with smaller neighbors. ”

“ We are not faced with an apportionment scheme that is a historical relic, with no present-day justification, or one that reflects the stranglehold of a particular group that, having once attained power, blindly resists a redistribution. The structure of the Junior College District of Metropolitan Kansas City is based upon a state statute enacted in 1961. Prior to that date, the individual school boards had the power to create their own junior colleges, as they still do, but there was apparently no authorization for cooperation among districts. ”

“ In recognition of the fact that individual school districts may lack the funds or the population to support a junior college of their own, the state legislature has authorized them to make voluntary arrangements with their neighbors for joint formation of a junior college district. If one of the cooperating school districts greatly preponderates in size, it enters into the arrangement knowing that its representation on the board of trustees, while large, will be somewhat smaller than it would be if based strictly on relative school enumeration. ”

“ The Court does not suggest how a formula could be devised that would provide a general rule for application to all the various junior college districts but would not share these alleged faults. If a large district falling within a given pecentage range were allocated the number of trustees corresponding to the top, rather than the bottom, of the range, that would also produce, on the Court's theory, a 'built-in discrimination' against voters in small districts. ”

“ I believe, to the contrary, that the need to preserve flexibility in the design of local governmental units that serve specialized functions and that must meet particular local conditions, furnishes a powerful reason to refuse to extend the Avery ruling beyond its original limits. If local units having general governmental powers are to be considered, like state legislatures, as having a substantial identity of function that justifies imposing on them a uniformity of elective structure, it is clear that specialized local entities are characterized by precisely the opposite of such identity. ”

“ If, as the Court speculates, other means will prove as effective as apportionment in the adaptation of local agencies to meet specific needs, presumably those other means will also enable the States just as effectively to accomplish whatever evils the Court thinks it is preventing by today's decision. The Court has not shown that, under the supervision of state legislatures that are apportioned according to Reynolds, flexible methods of apportionment of local official bodies carry any greater danger of abuse than these other means of achieving the desirable goal of specialization. ”

“ If equality cannot be achieved when representation is by component districts, why does the 'as far as practicable' standard not require at-large election of trustees? Is there something about these consideration that gives them a status under the Equal Protection Clause that is not possessed by a legislative desire to apportion by a formula of statewide application? ”

“ And today, the Court holds the 'one man, one vote' rule applicable to the various boards of trustees of Missouri's junior college system, and the case forebodes, if indeed it does not decide, that the rule is to be applied to every elective public body, no matter what its nature. ”

“ The Court noted that, 'while special-purpose organizations abound * * *, virtually every American lives within what he and his neighbors regard as a unit of local government with general responsibility and power for local affairs.' The Midland County Commissioners Court, the body whose composition was challenged in Avery, was found to possess a broad range of powers that made it 'representative of most of the general governing bodies of American cities, counties, towns, and villages,' and the Court was at pains to limit its holding to such general bodies. ”