This post is part of Challenging Precedent, a blog of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice examining race, law, and regulation in the Trump era.

This month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a second set of oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, which involves the constitutionality of Louisiana’s congressional map. The Supreme Court first heard arguments in this case in March 2025, then made the rare decision to hold reargument, after requesting supplemental briefing on whether the intentional creation of the second majority-Black district in Louisiana violates the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. 

In February 2022, the Louisiana State Legislature passed a new electoral map that maintained only one majority-Black district among the six congressional districts in the state, even though the Black population had increased to about one-third of the state’s total population–33.13% as of the 2020 census. Governor John Bel Edwards (D) vetoed the map, yet the legislature overrode the veto, almost entirely on party lines.

On March 30, 2022, individual Black plaintiffs along with organizational plaintiffs Louisiana State Conference of the NAACP and Power Coalition for Equity and Justice filed a lawsuit against Louisiana, arguing that the map diluted Black voting strength in Louisiana in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Specifically, the plaintiffs argued that the map “packed” large numbers of Black voters into a single majority-Black congressional district, while “cracking” the State’s remaining Black voters among the five remaining districts. The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana found that Plaintiffs were “substantially likely to prevail on the merits of their claims brought under Section 2,” which prohibits election practices that result in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on race. The district court found that the “appropriate remedy in this context is a remedial congressional redistricting plan that includes an additional majority-Black congressional district.” The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied an application for a stay of the district court’s order. 

In January 2024, acting under the district court order and the possibility that if they did not create a new map, the federal court may “impose the plaintiff’s proposed map,” Louisiana redrew its congressional map to include two majority-Black districts, while also carefully preserving the seats of powerful Republican incumbents, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Congresswoman Julia Letlow. 

Twelve days after current Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry (R) signed the map into law, a group of “non-African American voters” filed a complaint in federal district court, challenging this new map as a racial gerrymander in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, under the Supreme Court’s Shaw v. Reno line of cases, which hold that race cannot be a predominant factor in the construction of a district. A divided panel of three federal judges found the 2024 map unconstitutional, and the Robinson intervenor-defendants (who had filed the initial lawsuit challenging the 2022 map) and the State of Louisiana appealed to the Supreme Court. 

At the Supreme Court, the “non-African American” voters argued in their briefing that the intentional creation of a second majority-minority district in the 2024 map is unconstitutional, characterizing it as “a brutal, bizarrely-shaped racial gerrymander” that “now overrepresents Black voters in two Black-majority districts.” 

During this month’s oral arguments, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Janai Nelson, who argued for the Robinson litigants, challenged this argument that race predominated in the drawing of the maps. Nelson emphasized that the Supreme Court has recognized since Shaw that “there’s always an awareness of race”–even race consciousness–when a legislature draws district lines. As the Robinson litigants highlighted in their brief, the Court has recognized that “the decision to create a majority-minority district [is not] objectionable in and of itself.” Bush v. Vera, 517 U.S. 952, 962 (1996). 

Nelson drew a comparison between the facts in Louisiana v. Callais and the “nearly identical” facts in Allen v. Milligan, in which the Supreme Court held in 2023 that Alabama’s redistricting plan violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act under Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). Under Gingles, plaintiffs must show three “preconditions” for a Section 2 violation: (1) the minority group must be “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority” in a reasonably configured district, (2) the minority group must be “politically cohesive,” (meaning they often vote together as a bloc), and (3) the “white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it . . . to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” If these three threshold requirements are met, the plaintiff must then show that under the “totality of circumstances,” members of the protected class have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. Nelson argued that Louisiana clearly meets these criteria, pointing to extreme racially polarized voting and the fact that there has never been a Black person elected to statewide office in Louisiana–circumstances very similar to those in Alabama when the Court affirmed the Gingles framework just two years ago.

The oral argument also involved discussion of whether Section 2 protections should have an end date, with Nelson rejecting the comparison between Section 2 of the VRA and affirmative action in college admissions, which the Court struck down in SFFA v. Harvard. Justice Kavanaugh specifically asked Nelson whether Section 2 should have a “time limit,” given “this Court’s cases in a variety of contexts [which] have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time . . . but that they should not be indefinite and should have a[n] end point.” Nelson countered that just because race is an element of the remedy does not mean that an entire statute should dissolve, and Justice Kagan highlighted that Section 2 suits provide a remedy in response to current conditions in which there is vote dilution. In other words, a Section 2 remedy would be triggered only in response to evidence of racial discrimination.

A decision limiting or striking down Section 2 would have very significant consequences. Through several major decisions, the Court has already severely limited the scope of the VRA, which President Lyndon B. Johnson described as “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom” when he signed it into law. For example, in 2013 in its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Court struck down the VRA provision that provided a formula for determining which jurisdictions had to get federal approval for changes to voting policies, leading states to almost immediately enact new voter laws that restricted access to the ballot for voters of color. There are at least 30 cases currently asserting claims under Section 2 of the VRA, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Moreover, President Trump has urged Republican legislators to redraw congressional maps to create districts that would be more favorable to his party in the upcoming midterm elections. An analysis by the Black Voters Matter Fund found that a ruling striking down Section 2 “could help secure an additional 27 safe U.S. House seats for Republicans when compared to the 2024 House maps – at least 19 directly tied to the loss of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).”

Dayle Chung is a Bremond Fellow and a student at Stanford Law School.