Allen v. Milligan (Voting rights 2021)

The backstory here is unusual enough that it has to be understood before the legal questions make sense. The Supreme Court did not simply disapprove of Alabama's map on abstract grounds. In 2023, the Court held, 5-4, that Alabama's congressional map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by packing Black voters into a single district and dispersing the rest so they could never form a majority anywhere else. The Court affirmed a lower court order requiring a second district where Black voters could compete. That order was not a suggestion. It was a command from the highest court in the country.

Alabama did not comply. Instead, its legislature drew a new map, the 2023 plan now at issue, that the trial court said was designed from the start to make a second opportunity district impossible to create. Not difficult. Not inconvenient. Mathematically impossible. The legislature conjured supporting "findings" in the middle of the night, ignored its own traditional redistricting criteria when doing so served this goal, and declined to give any meaningful weight to partisan interests despite lobbying from former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to do exactly that. It even extended incumbent protection to Terri Sewell, the state's sole Democratic congresswoman, in a gesture that undercut any credible partisan explanation for the map's structure.

The trial court, after an eleven-day trial, found both a Section 2 violation and intentional racial discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. It again blocked Alabama's map and substituted a court-drawn remedial plan, the same one Alabama had run under in 2024.

Then, in May 2026, the Supreme Court vacated that injunction, one week before Alabama's primary was already underway, in light of its new decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Alabama immediately announced it would use the 2023 plan. The trial court issued a second injunction within days, making the same findings. Alabama ran straight back to the Supreme Court with an emergency application to stop the injunction.

Louisiana v. Callais, decided just weeks before these applications arrived, is the legal pivot point the majority relies on entirely. The Callais decision updated the Gingles framework in ways that make Section 2 cases harder to win. Plaintiffs can no longer draw their proposed alternative maps using race as a factor, even if the whole point of their map is to show that a majority-minority district is geographically possible. Plaintiffs also have to show that racial bloc voting cannot be explained by party, which is a more demanding standard in an era when race and party alignment are tightly correlated. And critically, a plaintiff's proposed map has to match the state's map on every legitimate districting criterion, not just most of them.

The majority held that the trial court had not correctly applied these new rules. Specifically, Alabama's 2023 map prioritized keeping the Gulf Coast together as a community of interest and avoided pairing incumbents in the same district. The plaintiffs' alternative map, the majority said, did not perform as well on those criteria. Under Callais, that gap matters. The majority concluded the trial court failed to properly account for it.

On the Fourteenth Amendment intentional discrimination claim, the majority said the trial court had drawn the wrong inference from Alabama's conduct. Under the good-faith presumption established in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP, a legislature's disagreement with a court order, even open defiance of it, is not the same thing as discriminatory animus. The per curiam opinion said the trial court had essentially punished Alabama for fighting the order rather than for intending to harm Black voters.

The majority also leaned on the Purcell principle. Changing hundreds of thousands of voters' congressional district assignments in the days before an election creates administrative disruption. The Court found that concern weighed in favor of letting Alabama use its own map, even an untested one, rather than the court-drawn substitute.

Justice Sotomayor's dissent, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, is sixteen pages and operates on multiple levels simultaneously. Her most pointed argument is about consistency. The Purcell principle says courts should not disrupt elections close to their dates. The majority invoked it to let Alabama use its never-before-used 2023 map. But Sotomayor documented that switching to that map required Alabama's county election officials to manually reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the state in at most seven days, a process the state's own director of elections testified normally takes three to four months and that no Alabama county had ever completed in a week. The court-drawn remedial map, by contrast, was the one all 600,000-plus affected voters had already been assigned to. The status quo was the court map. Switching to Alabama's map was the disruptive choice, not keeping the injunction in place.

She also invoked the clean hands doctrine. A party seeking equitable relief, which is what a stay is, must not have engaged in the conduct driving the harm it complains of. Alabama's complaint was election disruption. But Alabama created the disruption by refusing to comply with a court order the Supreme Court had already affirmed. Sotomayor showed Alabama had also taken flatly inconsistent positions: in 2022, it had argued that changing congressional districts four months before a primary was an impossible administrative burden requiring extraordinary justification. In 2026, it was telling the Court that same task could be done in less than a week.

On the merits, Sotomayor argued Callais did not say a word about Fourteenth Amendment intentional-discrimination claims. Callais was a Section 2 decision. The intent standard under the equal protection clause, drawn from Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., is a different body of law that Callais explicitly did not address. If the majority was faulting the trial court for misapplying Callais to a constitutional claim, Sotomayor wrote, it was imposing a standard Callais never established. And on discriminatory intent, she argued the record was not close: Alabama's own speaker had said the 2023 plan's goal was to find the one vote that might have gone differently in the 2023 Supreme Court decision, not to cure the violation the Court identified.