Allen v. Milligan, Docket No. 25A1314

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The Supreme Court has hit pause on a court-ordered map and keeps Alabama's contested congressional districts in place for now. The ruling applies a legal standard the Court itself rewrote just weeks earlier and signals the Court may be ready to make it much harder to prove that states are deliberately discriminating against Black voters. The case reveals a deepening divide on the Court about what counts as evidence of racial discrimination and who gets to decide election rules when time is running short.

The Fight Over Alabama's Congressional Map

This is the third time this dispute has reached the Supreme Court. After the 2020 census, Alabama drew a congressional map with only one district where Black voters could realistically elect their preferred candidate, even though Black Alabamians make up roughly 27 percent of the state's population. A federal court said that violated the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 law designed to prevent racial discrimination in voting. The Supreme Court agreed in 2023 in Allen v. Milligan and ordered Alabama to draw a fairer map.

Alabama's legislature responded by drawing a new map that a federal court found had been deliberately designed by using previously unused redistricting criteria invented from scratch and developed in secret. The new map made it mathematically impossible to include a second district where Black voters could win. The court entered a permanent injunction and drew its own remedial map, which governed the 2024 elections.

Then just weeks before this decision, the Supreme Court issued a major ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that significantly changed the legal standards for voting rights claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. After Callais, the Court vacated the district court's injunction in these cases, briefly restoring Alabama's 2023 map while the primary election was already under way. The district court then quickly issued a new preliminary injunction on largely the same grounds. Alabama immediately asked the Supreme Court to put that new injunction on hold. That pause is what this decision is about.

Two Separate Legal Frameworks

To understand why the majority and dissenters are talking past each other, it helps to know that two distinct legal theories are at play.

One is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that dilute the voting power of minority groups. Proving a violation requires satisfying the Gingles preconditions. Ginles is named for a 1986 Supreme Court case. It includes that plaintiffs' proposed alternative map must comply with traditional redistricting criteria. The Court's Callais decision updated those standards to require that any alternative map meet all of the state's legitimate redistricting goals "just as well" as the state's own map. Callais also required plaintiffs to control for partisan affiliation when proving that voters of different races vote differently.

The other theory is the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition on intentional racial discrimination. This is a separate and older legal framework. To prove it, plaintiffs only need to show that race was "a motivating factor" in a legislative decision. Not the sole or primary reason. Courts are supposed to presume that legislatures act in good faith, and findings of fact by trial judges can only be reversed if they are plainly wrong.

These two frameworks are legally separate. That distinction sits at the heart of the disagreement in this case.

What Each Side Argued

Alabama claimed the lower court violated the presumption of legislative good faith by treating the state's legal disagreement with an earlier court order as evidence of deliberate discrimination. The state also argued the district court failed to properly apply the new Callais standards. Specifically, it said the plaintiffs' proposed alternative map did not perform as well as Alabama's on two criteria: keeping the Gulf Coast community of interest intact, and avoiding a situation where two sitting members of Congress would have to run against each other.

The plaintiffs challenging the map argued that Callais changed the standards only for Section 2 disparate-impact claims and said nothing about the Fourteenth Amendment's intentional discrimination test. They also argued the district court had carefully applied the presumption of legislative good faith. The trial court had explicitly given Alabama's legislature "every benefit of the doubt," declined to consider the state's history of racial discrimination, and gave no weight to statements from minority legislators. The trial itself ran eleven days, included testimony from 51 witnesses, and received nearly 800 exhibits.

They also pointed out the practical problem of the court-drawn remedial map already loaded into voter registration systems. It had been in use for two years. Three Alabama counties with roughly 600,000 registered voters would need to be manually reassigned under a different map in as few as seven days. Alabama itself had previously told courts the process takes three to four months.

What the Supreme Court Decided

In an unsigned per curiam opinion, the majority sided with Alabama and granted the stay. The Court said Alabama was likely to succeed on the merits of both claims when the case is fully argued and decided.

On the intentional discrimination claim, the Court said the district court violated the presumption of legislative good faith by treating Alabama's legal disagreement with the prior court order as proof of discriminatory intent.

On the Voting Rights Act claim, the Court said the district court's analysis departed from Callais. Under that decision, the plaintiffs were required to show that their alternative map performed "just as well" as Alabama's on all legitimate redistricting criteria. The Court found the district court granted relief even though the plaintiffs' alternative map would not perform as well on two criteria: preserving the Gulf Coast community of interest and avoiding incumbent pairing.

On timing, the Court invoked what is known as the Purcell principle. It's a rule that courts should not alter election rules close to an election. But the majority specified the rule applies to federal courts. States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests, even when those decisions create administrative disruption.

This decision is not a final ruling. The case remains pending and will be decided on the full merits once the appeal is properly before the Court.

What the Dissenters Said

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, wrote a forceful dissent challenging the majority on the law, the facts, and the equities.

On the law, Sotomayor argued that Callais said nothing about the standard for Fourteenth Amendment intentional discrimination claims. The Court in Callais explicitly stated that its revised test for Section 2 does not require proving intent. It is hard to explain, she argued, how the district court's Fourteenth Amendment analysis could have departed from an opinion that expressly left the intent standard untouched. She also argued the majority's order nowhere acknowledges that the district court's factual findings are reviewed only for clear error — a standard the majority appeared to bypass entirely.

On the facts, Sotomayor pointed to the Alabama House Speaker, Nathaniel Ledbetter, who said: "If you think about where we were, the Supreme Court ruling [in Allen] was five to four. So there's just one judge that needed to see something different." The district court read that statement as evidence the legislature was focused on the Court's makeup rather than on remedying the discrimination it had been ordered to fix. The district court also found that Alabama adopted redistricting criteria it had never used before, developed in secret and made a second opportunity district mathematically impossible. A record Sotomayor called more than sufficient to support the finding of intentional discrimination.

On the equities, Sotomayor applied the clean hands doctrine. It's a principle that a party seeking equitable relief must not itself have acted unfairly. She argued Alabama's hands were far from clean. Alabama deliberately flouted the district court's injunction that the Supreme Court had already affirmed in 2023, drawing a map the state knew would not comply. And Alabama took flatly contradictory positions at different stages of the litigation. In 2022, the state argued that changing congressional maps four months before a primary would throw elections into chaos and require heroic efforts to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters. Now, in 2026, the state claims seven days is sufficient.

Sotomayor also turned the Purcell principle against the majority. The court-drawn remedial map had been in place for two years and was the status quo. It was the Supreme Court's own decision three weeks earlier to vacate the district court's injunction and restore Alabama's 2023 map while voting was already under way that set this disruption in motion. She argued the Court had the equitable authority to fix the mess it helped create rather than deepen it.

What This Decision Means and What Comes Next

This case exposes a fundamental question that will be answered only when the Court takes up the full appeal: how does the Court's new Callais standard interact with Fourteenth Amendment intentional discrimination claims?

Callais rewrote the rules for proving voting rights violations based on discriminatory effect. But Callais also said it was not overruling the 2023 decision in Allen that found Alabama's original map unlawfully discriminatory. And Callais explicitly said its new test does not require proving intent. The majority in this stay nonetheless applies Callais to the intentional discrimination analysis without clearly explaining how those two positions fit together.

Under established law, a plaintiff alleging intentional discrimination only needs to show race was a motivating factor, and trial courts' findings of fact are supposed to stand unless plainly wrong. The majority's order appears to apply a more demanding framework without saying so. If the full Court adopts that approach on the merits, it would significantly raise the bar for proving that a state deliberately entrenched racial discrimination. Even when a trial court found exactly that after weeks of evidence and full briefing.

The Purcell question and the clean hands argument will also be live on the full appeal. The Court will need to defend the nuance of this decision more fully when the case is argued on the merits. Meanwhile, Alabama's August 11 special primary election will proceed under its 2023 congressional map. This is the one the district court found was designed to make a second Black-opportunity district impossible. The full appeal is pending.