The Supreme Court on Monday directed lower courts to take another look at two cases centered on whether private individuals and civil rights organizations have the legal right to sue to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In brief orders, the high court set aside earlier lower court decisions and remanded the cases for further proceedings in light of its landmark ruling last month in Louisiana v. Callais, which weakened Section 2. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the actions.
At the heart of both disputes is a fundamental question: who exactly has the standing to bring lawsuits in federal court to address potential violations of Section 2, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices? The cases represent the latest high-stakes test for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Future rulings that restrict enforcement strictly to the federal government could reshape the landmark voting law, long considered the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, and significantly limit the ability of outside advocacy groups and individual voters to challenge local voting maps.
The current legal battle reached the Supreme Court through two separate challenges to legislative maps drawn after the 2020 census in Mississippi and North Dakota. In Mississippi, the state’s chapter of the NAACP and 14 individual voters brought the initial lawsuit. In North Dakota, the challenge was filed by the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, the Spirit Lake Tribe, and three Native American voters. Both sets of plaintiffs originally won their cases in federal district courts.
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North Dakota officials subsequently appealed their loss to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. A three-judge panel for the 8th Circuit reversed the lower court, ruling that Section 2 cannot be enforced by private plaintiffs suing under Section 1983—a federal law that allows individuals to sue government actors for constitutional and statutory violations. The 8th Circuit held that when Congress originally wrote the Voting Rights Act, it intended for only the U.S. Attorney General, not private citizens, to enforce Section 2. That ruling directly affected seven states: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
Lawyers representing the Native American tribes countered that the 8th Circuit’s decision broke away from more than 40 years of established legal practice across the United States. To support this, research by University of Michigan Law School professor Ellen Katz found that since 1982, private plaintiffs were parties to 96.4% of Section 2 claims that resulted in published decisions, and were the sole litigants in 86.7% of those cases. Furthermore, federal government lawyers during the Biden administration noted in 2024 that between 1982 and early 2024, private plaintiffs brought more than 400 Section 2 cases resulting in judicial decisions, while the Department of Justice brought just over 40.
In their legal filings to the Supreme Court, attorneys for the tribes argued against the restriction:
“Everywhere else in the nation, private plaintiffs can rely on an unbroken line of Supreme Court and circuit precedent to enforce the individual rights given to them by Congress in the Voting Rights Act. But not in the Eighth Circuit. The appeals court extinguished the remaining pathway for private enforcement of Section 2 of the VRA within its bounds.”
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Meanwhile, the Mississippi case was decided by a special three-judge district court panel, which allowed Mississippi state officials to bypass the circuit court and appeal directly to the Supreme Court. Mississippi officials echoed the 8th Circuit’s reasoning, arguing that the text of the law only explicitly provides an enforcement mechanism for the federal government.
“Although Congress had ambitious aims for the Voting Rights Act, its ambitions did not extend to buoying private litigation,” Mississippi lawyers wrote in their brief. “Congress had seen that private litigation had failed to vindicate voting rights. It steered a new course in the VRA — embracing powerful remedies, but not private enforcement.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision to vacate the lower court rulings, writing that the central question of the cases was not resolved by the Supreme Court’s recent action in the Louisiana case.
“This case presents only the question of Section 2’s private enforceability, which our decision in Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U. S. ___ (2026), did not address,” Jackson wrote. “Thus I see no basis for vacating the lower court’s judgment.”
Jackson added that based on the 1996 precedent Morse v. Republican Party of Virginia, she would have summarily affirmed the Mississippi decision and summarily reversed the 8th Circuit’s North Dakota ruling.
In a separate, unrelated matter on Monday’s order list, the Supreme Court turned away an appeal from Michael Dewayne Lairy, a regular criminal petitioner whose federal firearm sentence was five years longer than the statutory maximum.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a statement concurring with the denial of certiorari, explaining that the high court’s intervention was no longer necessary because the federal government acknowledged an error.
The government admitted it had inadvertently raised a statute-of-limitations defense in the lower courts despite an internal policy to waive such defenses in cases of clear legal ineligibility for enhanced sentences. After the government corrected the oversight and waived the defense in district court, Lairy was granted relief and released from prison.
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