Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sharply criticized her fellow Supreme Court justices Monday after the Court used its recent Louisiana redistricting ruling to send another major Voting Rights Act case back to a lower court — a move that could further weaken legal protections relied upon by voting-rights activists for decades.
At the center of the dispute is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the federal law that prohibits voting practices or district maps that discriminate on the basis of race.
The Supreme Court issued an order directing a Mississippi voting-rights case back to U.S. District Court for “further consideration” in light of the Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. That Louisiana decision significantly narrowed how states and courts can use race when drawing congressional districts.
Jackson immediately objected.
“This case presents only the question of Section 2’s private enforceability, which our decision in Louisiana v. Callais … did not address,” Jackson wrote in dissent. “Thus I see no basis for vacating the lower court’s judgment.”
Her complaint centered on what she viewed as the majority stretching the implications of the Louisiana ruling far beyond the specific constitutional questions involved in that case.
Louisiana v. Callais focused on whether Louisiana’s revised congressional map — which added a second majority-Black district in 2024 — amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
In that ruling, the Court acknowledged that states may consider compliance with the Voting Rights Act when drawing districts. However, the justices ultimately concluded that the law did not require Louisiana to create a second majority-Black district under the circumstances presented in the case.
The ruling sided with a lower court that had blocked the state from using the map.
Critics of the decision argue the Court has now made it substantially harder for plaintiffs to challenge congressional district maps under Section 2 because future challengers may now need to prove intentional racial discrimination rather than relying primarily on statistical disparities or district outcomes.
Supporters of the ruling argue the Court is reining in what they see as excessive race-based redistricting practices that increasingly treated race as the dominant factor in mapmaking.
The Court’s decision Monday to apply the Louisiana precedent to the Mississippi case immediately signaled that the justices may intend to reshape Voting Rights Act litigation nationwide, even beyond the exact facts involved in Callais.
That prospect alarmed Jackson, who has repeatedly warned against what she sees as the Court steadily narrowing federal civil-rights protections through procedural rulings and reinterpretations of longstanding precedent.
