The bottom line
On October 15, 2025, the Supreme Court heard reargument in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that will determine whether race-based redistricting under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act survives the Equal Protection Clause. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spent her time at the podium trying to convince the Court that Black voters are functionally disabled and that remedying their alleged electoral disadvantage is obviously a compelling state interest. Neither argument holds up under scrutiny, and watching her push them reveals something important about the philosophy underlying her entire approach to constitutional rights.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
The case, briefly explained
Louisiana drew its congressional map after the 2020 census with one majority-Black district out of six total. Black residents represent about one-third of Louisiana’s population. A group of Black voters sued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, arguing the map diluted their voting strength. The district court agreed, and after prolonged litigation in what became known as Robinson v. Landry, Louisiana was ordered to draw a second majority-Black district. It did so in Senate Bill 8 in 2024.
Then a separate group of voters, who are not Black, sued claiming that SB 8 amounts to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering under the 14th and 15th Amendments. They argued the map was drawn with race as the predominant factor, which under Shaw v. Reno (1993) triggers strict scrutiny — meaning the state has to demonstrate a compelling interest and narrowly tailored means of achieving it. The Supreme Court took the case, argued it in March 2025, then issued an unusual order for reargument in October 2025.
The core tension is this: Section 2 of the VRA, as currently interpreted, requires states in some circumstances to create majority-minority districts. The Equal Protection Clause, as interpreted since Shaw v. Reno, requires that using race as the dominant factor in drawing districts survive strict scrutiny. The question the Court is wrestling with is whether complying with Section 2 constitutes a compelling government interest sufficient to justify race-conscious map drawing.
The ADA comparison and why it fails
Jackson’s most discussed moment came when she invoked the Americans with Disabilities Act as an analogy for remedial race-conscious redistricting. Her argument was that the ADA did not require proof of intentional discrimination — Congress simply recognized that a world built without disabled people in mind created a discriminatory effect, and it required accommodation regardless of intent. She suggested Section 2 of the VRA works the same way, and at one point used the word “disabled” to describe what happens to minority voters in certain electoral structures.
The backlash to the word choice was predictable and, frankly, somewhat beside the point. What matters is whether the analogy is legally coherent. It is not.
The ADA works by identifying a physical barrier — a step, a narrow doorway, the absence of a ramp — and requiring that it be removed. The barrier exists independently of the identity of the person trying to enter the building. A step is a step regardless of who is approaching it. The accommodation required is neutral in application: the ramp serves everyone who uses a wheelchair, regardless of race, religion, or any other characteristic. Congress was responding to a specific, measurable, physical incapacity imposed by the built environment.
Race-based redistricting works from an entirely different premise. It starts with the demographic composition of a district and draws geographic lines to ensure a specific racial group constitutes a majority within those lines. It does not remove a neutral barrier. It creates a racially sorted outcome. The analogy would only hold if the ADA required that ramps be built exclusively for Black wheelchair users, or that certain buildings be designated accessible only for members of specific ethnic groups. Nobody would accept that framing for the ADA, because it would be openly discriminatory. The logic is the same in redistricting.
What Jackson’s argument actually assumes
There is a premise buried inside Jackson’s entire line of questioning that deserves to be examined directly. She argues that having only one majority-Black district in a state that is one-third Black represents a denial of equal electoral opportunity. Her exchange with Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga was revealing: she told him she did not understand why complying with Section 2 is not “obviously” a compelling state interest, and she challenged him sharply when he pushed back.
But her framing assumes that electoral outcomes should be proportional to racial demographics. In a state that is 33 percent Black, she implies, two of six congressional seats should be majority-Black by design. That is the underlying logic. It has to be, because there is no other way the math works out to an obvious entitlement.
The problem is that voting is not a racial entitlement. It is an individual right. Every person in Louisiana, regardless of race, casts one vote. That vote counts the same as every other vote in their congressional district. If the voters of Louisiana’s current congressional districts — under a racially neutral map — elect five white candidates and one Black candidate, that outcome reflects how individual voters voted, not how the government allocated rights based on skin color. You could not make the same argument about almost any other right. If Black residents are 33 percent of Louisiana’s population but represent 40 percent of its business owners or 20 percent of its engineers, nobody argues those outcomes represent a constitutional injury requiring government remedy. We accept that individual outcomes aggregate in ways that do not mirror demographic ratios, because individual choices and circumstances vary.
Jackson’s argument treats electoral outcomes as something the government owes to racial groups in proportion to their share of the population. That is a fundamentally collectivist model of rights, and it is in direct conflict with how the 15th Amendment has been understood for most of American history. The 15th Amendment says the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race. It guarantees the individual right to cast a ballot. It says nothing about guaranteeing that racial groups win districts in proportion to their population share.
The Shaw v. Reno problem
Shaw v. Reno (1993) established that even when a legislature is trying to comply with the VRA, the use of race as the predominant factor in drawing district lines triggers strict scrutiny. The Court recognized that racial sorting of voters into separate districts, even for ostensibly remedial purposes, raises serious equal protection concerns. The person harmed is not just the voter packed into or pulled out of a district — it is every voter whose representation has been determined by their race rather than by neutral geographic and political criteria.
The Callais plaintiffs are making exactly that argument. They are not contesting that Louisiana’s Black residents have the right to vote. They are contesting that the state drew the SB 8 map with race as the dominant criterion, placing them in a legally distinct category from other citizens when determining whose vote goes where. Under Shaw, that requires justification that survives strict scrutiny.
Jackson’s response is essentially that compliance with Section 2 is a compelling interest sufficient to clear that bar. But the Court has specifically declined to decide that question in prior cases — Allen v. Milligan (2023), which dealt with a similar Alabama redistricting dispute, was argued and decided on other grounds, and Justice Barrett pointedly raised during the October 2025 arguments that the Court had “assumed without deciding” whether Section 2 compliance is compelling. That is a significant gap, and it is the gap the Callais case is meant to close.
If the Court holds that race-based map drawing requires strict scrutiny and that Section 2 compliance alone does not satisfy it, the implication is enormous: the entire majority-minority district apparatus built since the Voting Rights Act’s strengthening in 1982 would require fresh justification that the current standard cannot provide. That is what is actually at stake in this case, and it is why Jackson argued so forcefully.
The problem with the remedial framework
Let me grant the strongest version of the argument Jackson is making. Suppose we accept that historical discrimination has created conditions in which Black voters are systematically less successful at electing candidates of their choice. Is the remedy to draw electoral maps that guarantee certain outcomes based on race?
The Supreme Court has actually grappled with exactly this kind of question in contexts well outside redistricting. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Court held 6-3 that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause. Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion was explicit: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” The idea that you can remedy the effects of past racial discrimination by imposing racial categories in the present — just with different intended beneficiaries — was rejected. The constitutional guarantee is individual, not group-based.
Jackson dissented vigorously in SFFA. Her dissent argued for a race-conscious framework that the majority explicitly rejected. The argument she made in Callais is structurally the same: historical discrimination justifies present-day racial sorting for remedial purposes, and anyone who challenges this is misreading both the law and history. The majority of the Court has already told her, in a case she participated in and lost, that this is not how the Constitution works.
What the Court is likely to do
Based on the October 15 arguments and the Court’s broader trajectory since Bruen and SFFA, the conservative majority appears ready to curtail Section 2 significantly. SCOTUSblog’s analysis of the arguments noted the Court “appears ready to curtail a major provision of the Voting Rights Act.” The specific form that curtailment takes matters enormously.
One option is a narrow ruling that Louisiana’s specific map fails strict scrutiny without resolving whether Section 2 compliance is ever a compelling interest. A broader ruling could hold that drawing majority-minority districts based on race, without proof of intentional discrimination in the specific jurisdiction, cannot satisfy strict scrutiny regardless of the remedial justification. The broader ruling would effectively end mandatory majority-minority district creation as a VRA remedy.
From a constitutional standpoint, the broader ruling is the right one. The 15th Amendment prohibits racial discrimination in voting. The 14th Amendment prohibits racial discrimination in government action generally. A scheme that requires state legislatures to sort voters by race in order to produce racially proportionate electoral outcomes is in tension with both. The fact that it is a well-intentioned scheme — aimed at benefiting historically disadvantaged groups rather than harming them — does not resolve the constitutional problem. The Constitution does not permit racial sorting by government actors on a sliding scale based on the goodness of the intentions involved.
Why this matters beyond redistricting
I follow gun law more than I follow redistricting law, and normally I would leave voting rights analysis to someone else. But I covered this because the philosophy Jackson is applying in Callais is the same philosophy she brings to every constitutional question, including the ones that affect the Second Amendment directly.
The model Jackson is working from treats constitutional rights as collective entitlements that can be allocated and adjusted by government actors in pursuit of equitable group outcomes. Under that model, the government’s interest in managing outcomes — whether electoral, social, or public safety-related — can justify imposing burdens on individual rights. The individual’s right matters less than the government’s theory of what the group result should look like.
That model, applied to the Second Amendment, produces the exact reasoning pattern that gun control advocates use to argue that public safety interests justify restricting individual gun ownership regardless of whether the individual has done anything wrong. It is the same logic. The only difference is which rights are being burdened in service of which policy goal. A justice who believes the government can sort voters into racial districts in order to produce preferred collective outcomes is not going to apply rigorous individual-rights analysis when the question is whether the government can restrict law-abiding gun owners in the name of a collective safety interest.
This is why judicial philosophy matters, and why the Callais arguments are worth paying attention to even if you think redistricting is a niche issue. The legal framework Jackson wants to apply to voting maps is the same framework that would give government enormous latitude to manage every other enumerated right based on collective outcome theories. The conservative majority on this Court has been pushing back on that framework, case by case, since at least Heller in 2008. Callais is the next round.
Get the Weekly Briefing
New analysis delivered every week. Court decisions, case updates, and expert commentary.