Louisiana v. Callais, consolidated with Robinson v. Callais, , is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning racial gerrymandering and redistricting in the state of Louisiana following the 2020 United States census. After the Supreme Court's decision in Allen v. Milligan, the Louisiana legislature produced a new map under court orders, allocating two of the state's six districts as majority-minority districts using the state's 2020 census demographics and in compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The new maps were challenged as racially-gerrymandered and a constitutional violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In a 6–3 decision, the Court ruled along ideological lines that affirmed the federal district panel's judgement that the new redistricting map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fifteenth Amendment.
While the Court declined to find Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, it established additional requirements for vote dilution claims to succeed, beyond the ones set out in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, held that plaintiffs in Section 2 challenges must demonstrate that a state intentionally redistricted to diminish the opportunity for minority voters, by the plaintiffs offering their own, alternative maps that meet the state's legitimate goals while correcting the minority vote. Absent such proof, the Court indicated that such challenges would be deemed not an illegal gerrymander, under the precedent of Rucho v. Common Cause (2019).
Background
Voting Rights Act of 1965 and redistricting The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) was signed into law under Lyndon B. Johnson. Prior to that, many of the southern United States had Jim Crow laws that promoted racial segregation despite the guarantees of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, particularly limiting the ability of Black Americans to vote with poll taxes. After organized protests, including the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 and other violence, Johnson urged Congress to pass laws to assure that minorities had the right to vote, leading to the passage of the VRA and other civil rights laws. As enacted, the VRA prevented state laws that deliberately restricted minorities' ability to vote.
Among other amendments to the VRA, a 1982 amendment was made following the Supreme Court ruling in the redistricting case Mobile v. Bolden (1980), which had ruled that exclusionary voting practices were unlawful under the VRA "only if motivated by a discriminatory purpose" under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The 1982 amendment added language to the VRA to screen for voting practices that would cause "a class of [protected] citizens ... have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." The new language did not require exact proportional representation, but implied a minimum limit to meet the VRA.
The 1982 amendment was central to the Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). The decision in Gingles gave a set of three preconditions to determine if a redistricting map was racially discriminatory under the 1982 VRA amendment: The plaintiffs (challenging the redistricting) can show the minority group make up a sufficiently large group in a "reasonably configured district" without violating "traditional districting criteria"; The minority group is "politically cohesive", typically voting for the same issues; And whether the majority group vote "sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidates". If all three preconditions are met, then the judiciary can evaluate the "totality of the circumstances" if the minority group's ability to vote for their preferred candidate is invalidated.
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has issued several decisions prior to Callais placing limits on the VRA. These cases include Shelby County v. Holder (2013) which struck down the preclearance requirements for any voting-related state laws for nine states, which had previously been justified by Section 5 of the VRA. These states then instituted new redistricting maps from the 2020 United States census.
Case background Following the 2020 census, Louisiana was assigned six seats in the United States House of Representatives. The census found that about one-third of the people in the state were Black. The Louisiana State Legislature, where the Republican Party held a majority in both chambers, approved a new district map that was largely unchanged, giving the state five districts with White majorities and one with a Black majority.
Lawyers challenged the new map in court, alleging it violated Section 2 of the VRA. In the ensuing case, Robinson v. Ardoin, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick ruled in June 2022 that the map violated the VRA by not including a second majority-Black district, and issued an order enjoining the state from using its map. Louisiana's Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin sought a stay of the order from the Fifth Circuit, which was denied. Ardoin then sought relief from the Supreme Court, which stayed the order pending its decision in Allen v. Milligan, a similar VRA case from Alabama.
In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Allen that Alabama's district map violated the VRA. Consequently, the Court lifted its stay of Dick's ruling, returning the case to the Fifth Circuit. In declining to stay the order again, the Fifth Circuit told the legislature that unless it passed a map with two majority-Black districts by January 15, 2024, Judge Dick could draw and impose a new map. In order to prevent this, the legislature held a special session and in January 2024 passed a new map of its own in which its 6th congressional district became the state's second majority-Black district.
A lawsuit over the state's new map was then filed by a group of plaintiffs calling themselves "non–African-American voters", led by Phillip "Bert" Callais, who lived in an area near Baton Rouge that had been brought into the new majority-Black district. The suit claimed the 6th district was racially gerrymandered and violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Because it was a constitutional rather than a statutory challenge, the case was heard by a panel of three federal district judges from the Western District of Louisiana, rather than a single judge. In May 2024, the panel ruled 2–1 that the new map was unconstitutionally gerrymandered and blocked its use. The state sought a stay from the Supreme Court, arguing it was too close to the election to create a new map. The Supreme Court ordered the state to use, due to the timing constraints, the January 2024 map for the 2024 elections, without ruling on the merits of the panel's decision.
Supreme Court Two separate petitions were filed with the Supreme Court to hear the challenge on the district panel's ruling: one from the state itself (Louisiana v. Callais) and another from Black voters and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP (Robinson v. Callais). The Supreme Court agreed to hear both cases and consolidated them in November 2024.
The first oral argument was held on March 24, 2025. On June 27, 2025, instead of issuing a ruling, the Court ordered reargument for the 2025 term, with only Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.
During the summer recess before its 2025 term, the Supreme Court directed all parties to submit supplemental briefs on a new question: whether the new maps violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. There were rumors that the reargument and added question were signs that the Court was preparing to make major changes in its jurisprudence (as it had done in Citizens United v. FEC), perhaps by ruling that compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act would be unconstitutional. In its supplemental brief, Louisiana said it would no longer defend its position in the case at the Supreme Court, and instead argued that the new maps violated the 14th and 15th Amendments.
The second oral session for the case took place on October 15, 2025. There were rumors that the Court would limit the use of the VRA for redistricting by suggesting that the Act's mandates have a time limit.
Decision The court issued its decision on April 29, 2026. In a 6–3 decision, the court affirmed the three-judge district court's ruling that the state's new map was an illegal racial gerrymander. The majority opinion was delivered by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito wrote: "Allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context. Compliance with section 2 [of the VRA] thus could not justify the state's use of race-based redistricting here. The state's attempt to satisfy the Middle District's ruling, although understandable, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander."
The decision did not hold Section 2 of the VRA to be unconstitutional, nor did it overturn cases such as Allen v. Milligan (2023), though Alito wrote that "major developments" since one of the last major tests of Section 2, Gingles, required "additional considerations." Gingles provided for three pre-conditions: that the minority voters were "sufficiently numerous and compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district"; that they voted in a "politically cohesive" manner; and that the majority voted in a bloc as to defeat the minority's preferred candidate. Alito said of the first Gingles precondition, computer-aided redistricting tools have advanced enough for plaintiffs challenging maps to demonstrate a map that "fully achieves all the State’s legitimate goals" including incumbency protection by "a specific margin of victory" while creating the majority-minority district. For the second and third Gingles preconditions, Alito said that under the combination of the US having a two-party system coupled with the ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering was non-justiciable within federal courts, that "a litigant can easily exploit [Section 2] for partisan purposes by 'repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim. Finally, Alito said, in regards to the final part of the Gingles test, that "things have changed dramatically" in the southern states since the VRA was passed, and "black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate." As such, the addition of a second majority-Black district in the challenged Louisiana maps was racially motivated and not required. He concluded that a successful challenger must now prove that a state "intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race." Failing to "disentangle race from the state's race-neutral considerations, including politics" will now likely lead to an unsuccessful suit.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas (joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch) contended that Section 2 of the VRA should not apply to districting at all, writing that the court "should never have interpreted" it "to effectively give racial groups 'an entitlement to roughly proportional representation'."