Jurisdictional statement - About Redistricting - Loyola Law School

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[government] the burden of establishing that the
same decision would have resulted even had the
impermissible purpose not been considered.” Village
of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development
Corp., 429 U.S. 252, 270 n.21 (1977) (emphasis
added). If the government does not carry this
burden of showing, by a preponderance of the evidence,
that its race-neutral reasons would have
sufficed to motivate its decision absent the racial
motive, then the court must treat the government’s
ostensibly facially neutral law as, in fact, a racial
classification. The law must be justified by some
purpose sufficiently weighty to justify racial classifications,
such as remedying past discrimination. See
Mt. Healthy City School Bd. v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274,
285 (1977).
The court below ignored this well-established
Arlington Heights/Mt. Healthy framework of shifting
burdens for determining causation in mixed-motive
cases. Instead, the lower court purported to rely on
the line of “racial gerrymandering” decisions starting
with Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 (1993), and required
that the plaintiffs not only prove that race was a
contributing cause to a governmental decision, but
also prove that race was the but-for cause of the
decision to the exclusion of all other possible nonracial
explanations. See App. at 5a-8a.
The lower court misunderstood this Court’s “predominant
factor” line of cases. None of these
decisions cast any doubt on the principle that, if the
plaintiff shows a decision is partly motivated by
racial purposes, then the burden shifts to the government
to rebut the inference that racial purpose was
the but-for cause of its decision. Rather than modifying
this bedrock of equal protection doctrine, the