COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST AND MINORITY DISTRICTING AFTER MILLER V. JOHNSON

The 1990s have witnessed growing controversy over the issues of minori ty districting and representation. These controversies have revolved a round competing conceptions of the community of interest standard in r edistricting. One conception, the transcendent community of interest, suggests that minority groups, in and of themselves, represent a commu nity of interest that transcends space as a result of the group's shar ed history, culture and legacy of discrimination and segregation. A se cond view, the traditional geographic com munity of interest, defines the concept as :a formal and/or functional region which can cut across racial and ethnic group divisions. In the early 1990s, the US Departm ent of Justice displayed the transcendent community of interest concep t in maximizing majority-minority districts across the South. In the m id 1990s, however, the US Supreme Court and Federal District Courts in invalidating some of these districts have strongly enunciated the tra ditional geographic conception. This article examines these issues and their potential impact on minority districting and representation by examining the case of Georgia, subject of the US Supreme Court's June 1995 decision in Miller v.Johnson which declared Georgia's 11th congre ssional district unconstitutional. The last part of the article consid ers the future impact of this decision by examining how Georgia's cong ressional districts were redrawn by a Federal District Court in Decemb er 1995 based on the concept of traditional, geographic community of i nterest districts. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.