The case, which centers on whether Louisiana’s congressional districts are an illegal racial gerrymander, tests the leeway that states have in drawing voting maps.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in a dispute over whether Louisiana’s legislature impermissibly took race into account when drawing the state’s latest congressional voting map.
The justices’ decision in the dispute could determine how congressional maps are drawn in Louisiana and beyond as courts wrestle with the extent to which states can legally consider race in the process. It is the latest in a series of challenges to the Voting Rights Act to come before the court in recent years.
The Supreme Court has long recognized that a possible tension exists between Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits practices that dilute the voting power of racial minorities, and the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which courts have said requires that maps cannot be based on race unless they are narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest.
The justices have traditionally given states some leeway in navigating the two to create their maps.
But the Louisiana dispute will test how courts should view maps when these principles bump up against each other.
The results of the dispute, which could shift the boundaries of majority-Black districts in the state, could also help determine the balance of power in the House of Representatives in the coming years, at a time when political control of the chamber has frequently rested on thin margins.