Louisiana v. Callais

After the 2020 census, Louisiana redrew its congressional map with only one majority-Black district out of six, even though Black residents made up roughly a third of the state's population. 

A federal court ruled in a related case, Robinson v. Ardoin, that the map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting power, so the legislature drew a new map, SB8, adding a second majority-Black district: a sprawling, oddly-shaped district stretching some 250 miles from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. A separate group of voters then sued, arguing SB8 itself was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that sorted voters predominantly by race.

Because the case originated before a three-judge federal district panel, Louisiana was entitled to appeal directly to the Supreme Court rather than going through a circuit court first. 

The Court initially heard argument on March 24, 2025, then took the unusual step of ordering reargument on a broader question, namely whether complying with the VRA can ever justify a state's intentional use of race in redistricting, heard on October 15, 2025. The consolidated decision, written by Justice Alito, issued more than a year after the first argument, on April 29, 2026.

Louisiana and the challengers who brought the racial-gerrymandering claim argued that intentionally drawing a district to be majority-Black in order to satisfy Section 2 is itself race-based sorting of voters, and that the state lacked any "compelling interest" justifying that use of race once the district's bizarre shape showed race, not traditional districting principles, had predominated. 

The state's defenders, including a separate group of Black voters who had originally sued to get the second majority-Black district created, argued that Section 2 exists precisely to remedy vote dilution, that Louisiana had complied with a federal court's own finding that the first map violated the Act, and that treating VRA compliance itself as constitutionally suspect would leave states with no way to follow the law without being sued no matter which map they draw.

A 6–3 Court held that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to draw a second majority-Black district, so no compelling interest justified SB8's use of race, making the map an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, wrote separately urging the Court to go further and hold Section 2 itself unconstitutional as applied to redistricting. Justice Kagan's dissent, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, warned that the ruling's heightened requirements for Section 2 claims render the provision "all but a dead letter" for future redistricting challenges. 

The Court took the additional step of allowing the ruling to take effect within days rather than after the usual waiting period. Combined with Louisiana's decision to postpone its own primary election to redraw maps, that threw the state's election calendar into confusion even as tens of thousands of voters had already cast ballots. Nationally, the decision makes it significantly harder for voters of color to win Section 2 challenges to redistricting maps going forward, reshaping how states across the country will draw districts after future censuses.