League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry
The Supreme Court let stand Texas's mid-decade Republican redistricting plan against a partisan-gerrymander challenge, finding no reliable legal test to strike it down for one-sided political motives alone. But the Court struck down the plan's treatment of one South Texas district, ruling that lawmakers had illegally diluted Latino voting power to protect an incumbent congressman.
The decision leaves partisan gerrymandering largely unpoliced by courts while reinforcing that race-based vote dilution claims under the Voting Rights Act remain fully enforceable, forcing Texas to redraw the affected districts before further elections.
“In essence the State took away the Latinos’ opportunity because Latinos were about to exercise it.”
Explaining why redrawing District 23 to remove rising Latino voting power violated the Voting Rights Act.
How it got here: A three-judge federal district court twice rejected the challengers' claims; the Supreme Court had earlier vacated and remanded once in light of Vieth v. Jubelirer before hearing this appeal directly.
The Case in Depth
What happened
After Republicans won full control of the Texas legislature in 2002, they replaced a court-drawn congressional map with a new one designed to maximize Republican seats. The changes reconfigured District 23, held by a Republican incumbent whose Latino support was collapsing, by moving out heavily Latino, Democratic-leaning voters and adding Anglo Republican voters, while creating a new District 25 elsewhere. Voters and civil-rights groups sued, challenging the map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
The question before the Court
Could Texas Republicans redraw the state's congressional map purely for partisan gain, and did splitting a fast-growing Latino community to protect an incumbent violate the Voting Rights Act?
The Court's answer
Partly. On the statewide partisan-gerrymander claim, the answer is no — the Court found that redrawing districts mid-decade purely for partisan advantage does not by itself violate the Constitution, because no one has offered a reliable, manageable standard for measuring when partisan line-drawing crosses a constitutional line. The timing of the redistricting and the legislature's admitted partisan motive were not enough on their own.
On the Voting Rights Act claim, the answer is yes — Texas violated the Act by redrawing District 23 to remove the Latino voters who were about to elect their preferred candidate, and it could not fix that harm by creating a new district, District 25, that combined two Latino communities hundreds of miles apart with different needs and interests. A separate claim about a Dallas-area district failed because the challengers could not show Black voters actually controlled the outcome there.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Texas had to redraw several South Texas congressional districts before subsequent elections, directly affecting who represented those areas. The ruling also signaled to state legislatures nationwide that they retain wide latitude to redraw maps mid-decade for partisan advantage, but that doing so while weakening a minority group's electoral opportunity can still trigger liability under the Voting Rights Act.
What changes now
The districts in south and west Texas, including District 23 and the surrounding districts affected by its redrawing, must be redrawn to fix the Voting Rights Act violation before future elections, with the case sent back to the district court for that remedy. The statewide partisan-gerrymander claim and the Dallas-area Voting Rights Act claim were rejected outright and are not revisited. This is a final merits ruling on liability, though further proceedings on the remedy continue below.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Texas's map amounted to unconstitutional racial gerrymandering under the First Amendment or Equal Protection Clause for either District 23 or District 25, since the Voting Rights Act violation already required redrawing those districts. It also left open, rather than resolved, what legal standard—if any—could ever make a partisan gerrymander unconstitutional.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Stevens
Stevens agreed District 23 violated §2 but argued the entire map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and would have ordered the whole plan replaced with the prior court-drawn map. He proposed a detailed judicially manageable test for partisan gerrymandering based on intent and effect, and separately argued the cracking of the old majority-Black District 24 was itself unconstitutional and retrogressive under §5.
Dissent in part — Justice Souter
Souter joined the Court's rejection of the one-person-one-vote claim and its §2 ruling on District 23, but dissented from the plurality's rejection of the Dallas-area §2 claim. He argued the Fifth Circuit's rule requiring a 50%-plus minority population should be abandoned and that minority control of a dominant party's primary can satisfy the Gingles threshold, and would have remanded that claim for further review.
Dissent in part — Justice Breyer
Breyer joined the Court's justiciability holding and its §2 ruling on District 23, and joined much of Stevens's reasoning, concluding independently that the mid-decade timing, departure from traditional districting criteria, and entrenchment effects showed the entire plan violated equal protection.
Dissent in part — Justice Roberts
“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Criticizing the majority for invalidating a Latino-majority district over a compactness theory.
Roberts, joined by Alito, agreed the challengers failed to state a partisan-gerrymander claim, but dissented from the §2 ruling on District 23. He argued the majority wrongly required 'style points' compactness for a State's own remedial district, when District 25 was factually a more effective Latino opportunity district than old District 23 had been, and accused the majority of manufacturing a novel and unworkable compactness rule.
Dissent in part — Justice Scalia
Scalia, joined by Thomas, argued partisan-gerrymander claims are nonjusticiable altogether and that the §2 claims lacked merit for reasons stated in Justice Thomas's Holder v. Hall concurrence. He agreed the District Court did not clearly err on District 23's race-neutral motive, but concluded District 25 was created explicitly on the basis of race, triggering and satisfying strict scrutiny because it complied with §5 of the Voting Rights Act.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first reaffirmed that political-gerrymander claims can be heard by federal courts in principle, but explained that to win, challengers must show an actual burden on their representational rights measured by a reliable, manageable standard — not merely that partisan advantage was the legislature's motive for redrawing lines.
- Applying that requirement, the Court found the challengers' proposed test — treating any mid-decade redistricting done solely for partisan reasons as presumptively unconstitutional — unreliable, because it would have let an equally one-sided 1990s Democratic gerrymander stand while striking down the 2003 Republican plan, and because the timing of redistricting alone says little about its fairness.
- Turning to the Voting Rights Act claim, the Court applied the three-part Gingles test: whether a minority group is large and geographically compact enough to form a majority in a single district, is politically cohesive, and faces bloc voting by the majority that usually defeats its preferred candidates.
- The Court found Latino voters in the old District 23 satisfied all three conditions, and ruled that Texas's substitute, District 25, could not offset the harm because it combined two Latino communities hundreds of miles apart with different needs and interests, making it not 'reasonably compact' under the Act's own compactness test — a different inquiry than the compactness standard used in race-based equal-protection cases.
- Weighing the 'totality of circumstances,' including Texas's long history of discrimination against Latino voters and evidence the district was redrawn specifically because Latino voters were about to elect their own candidate, the Court concluded the changes to District 23 unlawfully diluted Latino voting strength.
- For a separate Dallas-area district, the Court held that African-American voters who could not show they actually controlled the Democratic primary's outcome had not proven a Voting Rights Act violation, because merely influencing an election's outcome is not the same as having the ability to elect a preferred candidate.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Vieth v. Jubelirer (541 U.S. 267)
Court declines to revisit Vieth's justiciability debate but rejects the specific mid-decade partisan test as unreliable.
Reaffirms Shaw v. Hunt (517 U.S. 899)
Reaffirms that a noncompact majority-minority district cannot remedy a Voting Rights Act violation elsewhere.
Limits Georgia v. Ashcroft (539 U.S. 461)
Limits its influence-district reasoning to §5 preclearance, holding it does not establish rights under §2.