For sixty years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been the main legal tool minority voters have to challenge maps that dilute their political power — the thing that forces states to draw a second majority-Black district when residential segregation and racially polarized voting mean one district isn’t enough to give Black voters a real chance to elect anyone. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court redefined what it takes to win that kind of claim, in a way that Justice Kagan says renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”

The Question the Case Actually Asked

Louisiana v. Callais (consolidated with Robinson v. Callais, No. 24-109 and 24-110) grew out of a familiar redistricting fight. Louisiana had drawn a congressional map with only one majority-Black district, even though Black residents make up about a third of the state’s population. Voters sued under Section 2, and a federal court agreed the map diluted Black voting power. The legislature responded by drawing a second majority-Black district, SB8 — and a different group of voters then sued, arguing SB8 itself was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because race predominated in how it was drawn.

That put the case at the center of a genuine collision in voting rights law: the Fourteenth Amendment generally bars the government from sorting people by race, but the Voting Rights Act sometimes requires race-conscious districting to remedy proven discrimination. Courts have long held that complying with a real Section 2 obligation is a “compelling interest” that can justify an otherwise race-conscious map. The question in Callais was whether Louisiana’s obligation under Section 2 was real enough to justify SB8 — which meant the Court had to decide, more fundamentally, what Section 2 actually requires.

The Ruling: SB8 Struck Down, and Section 2 Redefined

The Court ruled 6-3 that SB8 was unconstitutional. Justice Alito, writing for the majority (joined by Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett), held it directly: because the Voting Rights Act did not actually require Louisiana to create a second majority-Black district, the state had no compelling interest that could justify using race the way it did. From the syllabus:

“Held: 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.”

The consequential part isn’t just that one map lost — it’s how the majority narrowed what Section 2 requires going forward. Alito’s opinion holds that Section 2 liability now depends on proof of intentional discrimination, not just a discriminatory result:

“When §2 of the Act is properly interpreted, it imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred… §2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

That’s a sharp break from the “results test” Section 2 was built on: since Thornburg v. Gingles in 1986, plaintiffs could win by showing a map’s discriminatory effect, without proving lawmakers meant to discriminate — intent is notoriously difficult to prove and rarely admitted. The majority also raised the evidentiary bar for what plaintiffs must rule out, borrowing language from Alexander v. NAACP:

“To prevail, the plaintiff must ‘disentangle race from politics’ by proving ’that the former drove a district’s lines.’ That means, among other things, ruling out the competing explanation that political considerations dominated the legislature’s redistricting efforts. If either politics or race could explain a district’s contours, the plaintiff has not cleared its bar.”

In practice: if a state can point to any plausible partisan explanation for a map that also happens to dilute minority voting power, that’s now enough to defeat a Section 2 claim.

Justice Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, concurred but pushed for something more radical — reading Section 2 out of redistricting law entirely:

“This Court should never have interpreted §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation.’ … By doing so, the Court led legislatures and courts to ‘systematically divid[e] the country into electoral districts along racial lines.’ … ‘Blacks [we]re drawn into “black districts” and given “black representatives”; Hispanics [we]re drawn into Hispanic districts and given “Hispanic representatives”; and so on.’ … Today’s decision should largely put an end to this ‘disastrous misadventure’ in voting-rights jurisprudence.”

Thomas went further still: “I would go further and hold that §2 of the Voting Rights Act does not regulate districting at all… Therefore, no §2 challenge to districting should ever succeed.”

Kagan’s Dissent: “All But a Dead Letter”

Justice Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, wrote a dissent that reads less like a doctrinal disagreement and more like an obituary. Her central line:

“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.”

Kagan situated the ruling as the completion of a project the Court has been running for over a decade — one that started with Shelby County v. Holder gutting federal preclearance in 2013, and now finishes by hollowing out the private lawsuits that were left as the main enforcement mechanism after preclearance disappeared:

“The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’ It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.”

She also turned the majority’s own reasoning back on it. The majority suggested that if Section 2 claims become harder to win because conditions have improved, that’s a sign of racial progress worth celebrating — Kagan wasn’t having it:

“The majority tells us that the inability to make out a Section 2 claim will just be a mark of the Nation’s progress, and therefore ‘cause for celebration.’”

Her closing line names what she thinks is actually happening:

“I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

What Changed After: Alabama, 12 Days Later

Callais didn’t stay contained to Louisiana. On May 11, 2026 — twelve days after the ruling — the Supreme Court used it to unwind a map in Alabama that had already been found unconstitutional twice over.

The case was Allen v. Caster (No. 25-243), consolidated with two related cases, all part of the long-running Allen v. Milligan litigation over Alabama’s congressional map. A federal district court had found Alabama’s 2023 map violated both Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment — the court’s 268-page opinion documented that Alabama had drawn the lines with sharp, unexplained departures from its own traditional districting guidelines, producing legislative “findings” that Sotomayor’s dissent later described, quoting the district court, as conjured “out of ’thin air,’” in “’the dead of night.’”

The Supreme Court’s response was a 6-3, unsigned order — no majority opinion, no reasoning, just: “The judgments will be issued forthwith.” It vacated the lower court rulings and remanded for reconsideration “in light of Louisiana v. Callais.” The practical effect was immediate: the injunction that had blocked Alabama’s discriminatory map lifted, and that map went back into effect for the 2026 primary — an election that had already begun.

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, dissented, and pointed out something the majority didn’t grapple with: the district court’s Fourteenth Amendment finding of intentional discrimination was independent of anything Callais addressed.

“There is no reason to do so. In addition to holding that Alabama’s 2023 Redistricting Plan violates §2, the District Court held, in one of the three cases before this Court, that Alabama violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters in Alabama. That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais. Vacatur is thus inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”

Her closing line put it plainly:

“The Court today unceremoniously discards the District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding and careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue.”

The result, per contemporaneous reporting from NPR, the ACLU, and the Alabama Reflector: Alabama’s map reverted to six Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic-leaning district, Governor Kay Ivey called a special legislative session, and voters were left navigating an election where the rules changed after voting had already started. Callais was decided as a Louisiana case about what Section 2 requires — twelve days later, it was already being used to unwind a map a court had found intentionally discriminatory in a different state entirely. Callais itself had insisted it hadn’t overruled Allen v. Milligan — but the vacatur order came anyway, over Sotomayor’s objection that the two rulings don’t even address the same legal question.

Why This Belongs in the Court Reform Conversation

This case rarely gets mentioned alongside Dobbs or Trump v. United States, and it should. It completes a two-step demolition that took thirteen years: Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 eliminated federal preclearance, the mechanism that stopped discriminatory maps before they took effect. That left private Section 2 lawsuits — filed after the fact, at voters’ own expense — as the only real check left. Callais now guts that check too, by redefining Section 2 to require proof of intentional discrimination that is, by design, almost never available.

Nobody had to repeal the Voting Rights Act for this to happen. The statute is still on the books. What changed is that the Court has spent over a decade narrowing what it means, case by case, until — in Kagan’s words — it’s “all but a dead letter.” That’s the pattern worth naming: a Court that leaves a law’s text technically intact while draining every practical tool voters had to enforce it, and calls the result “progress.”

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