The Supreme Court’s Callais decision sets new framework for racial gerrymandering

On Wednesday, a divided Supreme Court narrowed the ability of states to use race as a determining factor in creating election districts, in a decision with potentially wide-ranging implications.

The decision in Louisiana v. Callais focused on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (or VRA), a landmark achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. Section 2 prohibits voter discrimination on the basis of race, color, or membership in language minority groups. In the Court’s prior term, it considered arguments in Callais without reaching a decision. It ordered Callais re-argued in the current term, over the objections of Justice Clarence Thomas.

On October 15, 2025, the Court heard new arguments in Callais about the constitutionality of a Louisiana redistricting law. In 2022, Louisiana redrew its congressional districts, but a federal court in Robinson v. Ardoin ruled the new map likely violated the Voting Rights Act because it did not include an additional majority Black district. But when Louisiana drew a new map, SB8, that contained such a district, the new map was challenged as a racial gerrymander.

The justices were considering whether Louisiana’s intentional creation of the second majority-minority congressional district in SB8 violated the 14th or 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The majority opinion

In his majority opinion in Callais, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that SB8 went against the purpose of the VRA. “Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander,” Alito explained. Joining Justice Alito’s majority opinion were Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 … was designed to enforce the Constitution— not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” Alito wrote.

Alito framed the case as confronting a “long-unresolved question whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act provides a compelling reason that may justify the intentional use of race in drawing legislative districts.”

“For over 30 years, the Court has simply assumed for the sake of argument that the answer is yes. These and other problems convinced the Court that the time had come to resolve whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act can indeed provide a compelling reason for race-based districting,” the decision reads.

Alito’s decision made it clear that the Court’s majority believed that any use of race in considering the composition of voting districts needed to meet the Court’s most demanding test: strict scrutiny. In this instance, Alito said the test required “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.”

Alito stated the Court’s majority decision in Callais did not conflict with Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), a previous case where the justices determined that a North Carolina General Assembly redistricting plan violated Section 2 of the VRA by diluting the impact of Black voters in five of the state’s six electoral districts.

Alito also said that other Court precedents and social conditions in the past 40 years changed the framework stated in Gingles. He cited four examples: vast social change throughout the country and particularly in the South; a correlation between race and party preference; partisan-gerrymandering claims being "repackaged" as racial-gerrymandering claims; and the use of computers to create alternative maps to produce racial balance, if possible.

“Under the updated Gingles framework, the facts of this suit easily require affirmance. Louisiana’s enactment of SB8 triggered strict scrutiny because the State’s underlying goal was racial,” he concluded.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas wrote, “[T]his Court should never have interpreted §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.’”

Justice Kagan’s Dissent

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, was deeply skeptical of the majority opinion, which Kagan labeled as the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way,” she wrote.

“The majority claims only to be ‘updat[ing]’ our Section 2 law, as though through a few technical tweaks. But in fact, those ‘updates’ eviscerate the law,” Kagan argued, citing what she called classic examples of vote dilution.

“Without a basis in Section 2’s text or the Constitution, the majority formulates new proof requirements for plaintiffs alleging vote dilution. Those demands, meant to ‘disentangle race from politics,’ leverage two features of modern political life: that racial identity and party preference are often linked and that politicians have free rein to adopt partisan gerrymanders,” Kagan said.

Kagan called the Callais decision “part of a set” of rulings, explaining that, in her view, “[f]or over a decade, this Court has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act.” For Kagan, one key example was Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which, she said, “made a nullity of Section 5” of the VRA. Shelby eliminated the act’s preclearance formula for regions, where areas with a history of racial discrimination had to seek federal approval for voting changes. The Shelby majority said the preclearance requirement didn’t relate to current conditions in areas where discrimination was once rampant.

She then referenced Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), where Kagan said the “Court did half what was needed to raze” Section 2 of the VRA. In Brnovich, the Court considered a question related to Section 2 of the VRA. The case involved a law passed in 2016 that made it illegal for someone to collect and deliver another person’s mail-in ballot. In a 6-3 decision, Justice Alito said Arizona had the right to establish time, place, and manner requirements for voting, and its voting policies were “not enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose.”

Kagan also said Callais conflicted with another recent Court decision Allen v. Milligan (2022). “For just three Terms ago [in Allen] the Court upheld a vote-dilution challenge to a districting map in a case much like this one—preserving Section 2 as a tool to prevent racially discriminatory redistricting.” She concluded that “today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter—the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting—minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process.”

In effect, the Callais majority decision narrows the instances where racial gerrymandering clams can be contested in court. The Court majority argued that its reframed interpretation “is the best reading of the statutory text and ensures that section of the Voting Rights Act does not exceed Congress’s authority under Section2 of the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Kagan condemned the decision because, in her view, “the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote,” the VRA, and because “the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

To be sure, there will be broader public discussion of the Callais decision during an already deeply contested election year, especially amidst claims about its impact on future elections.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.