The court had previously held in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that districting claims over racial discrimination could be brought under the Fifteenth Amendment.

Tennessee argued that the composition of legislative districts constituted a nonjusticiable political question, as the U.S. Supreme Court had held in Colegrove v. Green (1946).

The case did not have any immediate effect on electoral districts, but it set an important precedent regarding the power of federal courts to address redistricting.

Plaintiff Charles Baker was a Republican who lived in Shelby County, Tennessee, and had served as the mayor of Millington, near Memphis.

Baker's argument was that this discrepancy was causing him to fail to receive the "equal protection of the laws" the Fourteenth Amendment requires.

During the case, Justice Charles Evans Whittaker recused himself for health reasons, ultimately retiring from the Court in 1962.

Brennan also talked down Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas from their usual absolutist positions to achieve a compromise.

Their complaint is simply that the representatives are not sufficiently numerous or powerful.Having declared redistricting issues justiciable in Baker, the court laid out a new test for evaluating such claims.

This affected numerous state legislatures that had not redistricted congressional districts for decades, despite major population shifts.