Trial Briefs
Callais Comes Home
What the Landmark SCOTUS Decision Means for North Carolina
I. The North Carolina Irony
When the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais this past April, election lawyers in other states had to learn the doctrine from scratch. Not so for North Carolinians, because the high court was working with tools our state supplied.1 The landmark 1986 case Thornburg v. Gingles, led by then-Legal Defense Fund Director-Counsel Julius Chambers, challenged a North Carolina General Assembly redistricting plan that created seven new legislative districts for the House and Senate. Six were multi-member districts with a majority of white voters.2 In finding that five of the six contested districts discriminated against Black voters, the Court gave Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act its three-part vote dilution test. Fast forward to 2019 and Rucho v. Common Cause, which carries the name of a Mecklenburg County state senator. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that manipulating voting maps for political advantage presents a nonjusticiable political question that federal judges have no constitutional authority to hear or resolve.3 Callais fuses the two: Rucho made partisan line drawing lawful; from that premise, Callais reasons that Section 2 must be policed so racial vote dilution claims cannot smuggle partisan grievances back into federal court. To enforce that policing, Callais holds that plaintiffs must prove that race, rather than politics, drove the map making. Whatever one makes of the reasoning, its consequences will arrive here. The 2031 redistricting process is where they will likely arrive first.
II. The Callais Holding
Callais reached the Court as a racial gerrymandering challenge to Louisiana’s SB8, a congressional plan containing a second majority-Black district. A three-judge District Court panel struck the map, and the state appealed. In a 6-3 opinion by Justice Alito, the Supreme Court affirmed the District Court’s ruling. The opinion signaled its direction in the very first sentence: Section 2 “was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it.” 4 Alito opined that lower courts had been reading Section 2 to compel exactly the race-conscious line drawing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments prohibit.5 Because any legislative or governmental use of race triggers strict scrutiny, to survive a challenge, the government must prove a compelling interest that is narrowly tailored. The compelling interest Louisiana offered for its second majority-Black district was compliance with Section 2 itself, which the Court criticized as an assumption that had been accepted for three decades.6
Unsurprisingly, the assumption did not survive the case. The majority opinion held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create a new majority-minority district, therefore compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was not a compelling interest that satisfied strict scrutiny of the use of race in creating the district. Alito opined that Section 2 “imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”7 The majority took pains to deny that it was requiring a finding of intent, only “circumstances” supporting a “strong inference,” and further claimed it did not overrule Gingles. It simply “updat[ed]” the framework.8
Justice Kagan, writing for the three dissenters, answered that under the majority’s reading “a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” that the professed updates in reality “eviscerate the law,” and that a plaintiff must now prove legislators were “motivated by a discriminatory purpose,” which, “as Section 2’s drafters knew, is well-nigh impossible.”9 She placed Callais at the end of a line of cases in what she called the “now-completed demolition” of the Act.10
III. What the Ruling Means for North Carolina Trial Lawyers
The “updates” are where the day-to-day practice of these cases changes significantly. A Section 2 plaintiff has always had to show that a reasonably compact majority-minority district could be drawn with the use of a sample map illustrating the district. After Callais, Plaintiffs must now provide sample maps that align with every one of the state’s articulated political objectives, including protecting incumbents, without using race as a criterion.11 The racial bloc voting showing gets harder too. Polarization evidence must now establish voting patterns “that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.”12 Divergence between Black and white voters, standing alone, no longer proves anything the statute cares about; in the Court’s words, “simply pointing to inter-party racial polarization proves nothing.”13 Any expert analyzing a map must control for party affiliation and show that voters engage in racial-bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation. The Callais majority tied the requirement to disentangle race and politics back to Rucho: because partisan gerrymandering is lawful, a litigant could otherwise “repackage” a partisan claim in racial terms, and “[i]f race and politics are not disentangled … the VRA’s noble goal will be perverted.”14
The totality inquiry has been reoriented as well. The Callais ruling mandates that the inquiry focus on “present-day intentional racial discrimination.” Historical discrimination, and the “ongoing effects of societal discrimination,” are now given significantly less weight. 15 Courts previously required plaintiffs to show that maps had a racially discriminatory effect. Put plainly, Callais shifts the burden and now requires Plaintiffs to prove intentional discrimination by state lawmakers.
Consider what this reworking of the foundational framework in Gingles hands legislators who are drafting legislative maps. The more explicitly they state their partisan goals, the harder it becomes for a challenger to build a race-blind map that satisfies all of the districting objectives. And the more detailed the criteria, the more detailed a sample map challenging the drafting must be.
IV. 2026–2028: Why the Near Term Is Quiet
Whatever else Callais does, it will not redraw a North Carolina map this cycle. The congressional plan was redone in October 2025 and enacted amid the national wave of mid-decade redraws. Like every redistricting act in this state, the state constitution keeps the plan beyond the reach of the Governor’s veto power.16 Our first-in-the-nation primaries under the 2025 plan are already certified. A potential caveat: state law flatly bars mid-decade redistricting of legislative districts but says nothing about congressional ones, and some political watchers suggest a post-2026 congressional redraw remains legally available even if nobody currently wants one.17
But simple arithmetic makes the likelihood of somebody wanting one rather slim. The delegation already sits at roughly ten of fourteen seats for the majority Republican party, and the 2025 redraw pushed the First District, anchored for more than three decades in the majority-Black counties of the northeastern Black Belt, toward a more Republican profile. Extracting another seat would mean cracking the dense urban precincts of Mecklenburg or Wake and scattering those voters into districts won on narrower margins. Mapmakers have a word for how that tends to end: a “dummymander.” 18 Such a move converts aggression into losses, and it is never more dangerous than in a midterm running against the President’s party. Through 2028, the sensible play for the people holding the map-drawing pen is to protect what they have. Not because Callais constrains them, but because they have already taken nearly everything there is to take.
V. 2031 Is the Real Fight
The 2031 redraw is a different matter. The 2030 U.S. Census will reshape all U.S. Congressional and state legislative districts to reflect population shifts. North Carolina is projected to pick up a fifteenth congressional seat based upon the results of the 2030 census, which reopens every line in the state.19 The racial disentanglement rule courtesy of Callais flips mapmaker’s incentives, because a legislature that announces its partisan motives loudly enough has, under Callais, gone a long way toward insulating its map from a dilution claim.
Forty years of Section 2 practice taught legislatures to be careful about what they said in the map room. The new lesson is the opposite. And it is not difficult to identify where the focus will turn: the big urban counties where the state’s Black voters are concentrated and where mapmakers enjoy the widest discretion.
The remaining guardrail comes from state law, and it protects only legislative maps. The Whole County Provision recognized in Stephenson v. Bartlett in 2002 still requires House and Senate districts to be assembled, where practicable, from groupings of whole, contiguous counties.20 The holding established that mapmakers must preserve county boundaries and use only single-member districts, unless federal law explicitly requires otherwise.21 Stephenson enforces language written into the North Carolina Constitution, rather than articulating a principle inferred from the Constitution and should therefore survive Callais.
But the rule in Stephenson should not be overestimated. Article II commands that no county be divided in forming legislative districts.22 Taken literally that is impossible, because counties do not come in convenient sizes and districts must hold roughly equal populations. Stephenson reconciled the two commands by requiring that House and Senate districts be assembled, so far as practicable, from clusters of whole adjoining counties. Redistricting therefore happens in two steps. First the mapmaker sorts the hundred counties into clusters, each entitled to a whole number of districts. Then, inside each cluster, district lines are drawn. That second step is something Stephenson says almost nothing about, and it’s the second step that matters. The clusters with the most lines to place inside them are the populous urban ones, like Wake and Mecklenburg Counties, which are also where the state’s Black voters are most concentrated. As one North Carolina political scientist observed when the 2021 maps were being drawn, there are often several defensible ways to form the clusters, and then within clusters there is a great deal of latitude.23
VI. Where Claims May Migrate
What survives in federal court
A narrow federal lane with strict boundaries defined by Callais purportedly survives, though the dissent thoroughly dissected how unlikely survival is given the “updated” framework. In short, the plaintiff who can genuinely separate race from politics still has a claim. That means intra-party racial bloc analysis of the kind that carried the original Gingles record, and polarization evidence drawn from nonpartisan and primary elections, where party labels are not an issue. At the totality stage, the heavy lift will be evidence of present-day intent, a rushed enactment of the map, surgical precinct work in Black communities, and an ill-advised floor statement.
The state-constitutional campaign
Though the federal courthouse door now appears impossibly narrowed to dilution claims, the fights may simply move to state courts. In North Carolina, an experiment has already been run. While not a win, it provides a potential window to the future.
The backdrop to the experiment is the Harper trilogy. The trilogy is best understood as a single case that produced three merits opinions from the North Carolina Supreme Court in fourteen months and ended where it began only because the bench changed in between. In February 2022, a 4-3 majority held partisan gerrymandering claims justiciable under the state constitution, struck the 2021 congressional and legislative plans, and sent them back to be redrawn (Harper I).24 That December the same four justices reviewed what came back. They rejected the General Assembly’s remedial congressional plan as falling short of what Harper I required. That ruling is why the 2022 congressional election was run on a map drawn by court-appointed special masters rather than by the legislature (Harper II).25 Then the 2022 judicial elections seated two new justices and shifted the court to a 5-2 Republican majority. The legislative defendants petitioned to rehear Harper II; in February 2023 the new majority granted the petition and used it to reopen Harper I as well, even though the window to seek rehearing of that judgment had closed a year earlier.26 What emerged in April was Harper III: partisan gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable political questions, Harper I is overruled, Harper II is withdrawn, and the plaintiffs’ claims are dismissed with prejudice.27
Chief Justice Newby then sent the legislature back to draw again, subject to federal law and to what the opinion called the objective constraints in the state constitution located in Sections 3 and 5 of Article II.28 The court that ended judicial review of partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina told us in the same breath what it had left standing: only express text. Every state theory now has to reckon with that sentence.29
Former Justice Robert F. Orr decided to do some reckoning. On January 31, 2024, former Justice Orr filed a new lawsuit on behalf of voters, Bard v. North Carolina State Board of Elections. The case was built around eleven carefully chosen plaintiffs: nine Democrats and two unaffiliated voters, a former UNC System president and a former state senator among them, and pointedly no Republicans.30 It did not plead partisan gerrymandering. It asserted an unenumerated right to “fair” elections, retained by the people under Article I, Section 36 and implicit in the Declaration of Rights’ guarantees of frequent and free elections in the state constitution.31 In the complaint’s words, a process “free from the government’s purposeful action to influence or pre-determine the outcome” of particular contests.32 The Orr plaintiffs attracted notable friends. Former Justice Robin Hudson, a Democrat where Orr sat as a Republican, joined two UNC law adjuncts on an amicus brief tracing the claimed right back through English constitutional history.33
The theory failed. On May 20, 2026, three weeks after Callais, a unanimous North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that the suit was barred based on Harper III.34 In a 13-page unpublished decision, the Court of Appeals affirmed a three-judge trial panel that had dismissed the suit in June 2024 as presenting issues “clearly of a political nature” with “not a judicially discoverable or manageable standard by which to decide them.”35
But the reasoning matters more than the result. Judge Freeman’s opinion holds that because the constitution “expressly assigns” redistricting to the General Assembly, judicial review is “constrained to reviewing whether the act of the General Assembly violated an express constitutional provision.” An unenumerated fair elections right, whatever its pedigree, is not one.36 Unenumerated rights theories are therefore closed, at least for now. After Callais, express text theories, Stephenson groupings, equal population, and the specific commands of Article II, Sections 3 and 5 are arguably the strongest potential claims left in North Carolina.
Orr called Bard the most important case of his fifty years in practice, and he did not hide his feelings about watching it get “buried in the dust bin of unpublished opinions.”37 He has said he does not expect his clients to seek discretionary review, given the makeup of the current court.38 Of course because the Bard opinion is unpublished, the fair elections theory may not be dead, but rather waiting for the right time, and a different court.
Harper I and Harper III construed the same constitution and reached opposite conclusions. The only thing that changed was the makeup of the bench. Every remaining pathway, whether a revived fair elections or free elections theory, aggressive Stephenson enforcement in 2031, or a fresh challenge to whatever the next decade produces, will run through the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Seats on that court are contested this year and will be again in 2028, on the eve of the redraw. We may see Former Justice Orr back in front of a reconstituted bench in the future.
The scope of impact: the “update” beyond voting
On June 9, 2026, the United States Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (“OLC”) issued an opinion concluding, in express reliance on Callais, that disparate impact liability under Title VII is constitutionally suspect, on the theory that results-based employment liability needs the same “update” toward intent that the Court gave Section 2.39 The opinion’s target is the landmark 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power Co. and the jurisprudence built on that case. Griggs established that employment practices that have a disproportionately negative disparate impact on racial minorities are illegal under Title VII, even if the employer had no discriminatory intent. Congress responded to Griggs by codifying the business necessity framework in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, writing the mechanics of disparate impact claims into the statute itself.40 The OLC opinion doesn’t change the law or bind courts, but instead shifts enforcement posture and how DOJ litigate positions. The practical impact of the opinion doesn’t touch private claims, but it does plainly indicate where the next constitutional fight is likely to land.
The response to any extension of Callais now is found in the court’s opinion itself. Callais construed Congress’s Fifteenth Amendment enforcement power over voting; Title VII rests principally on the Commerce Clause, which is not mentioned in Alito’s opinion.41 For half a century, Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer has held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s enforcement power supports applying Title VII’s full framework to the states, and the Court has not hinted that its congruence and proportionality cases disturbed that holding.42 But it would be Pollyannaish not to recognize that the ambition behind the OLC opinion reaches farther back in time than its publication.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurrence in the disparate-impact case Ricci v. DeStefano seventeen years ago forecast “the war between disparate impact and equal protection.” 43 The case involved the administration of a promotional exam that resulted in no Black candidates and at most two Latino candidates scoring high enough for promotion. The city got rid of the test results. A group of white and Latino employees sued. The plaintiffs prevailed, but the majority opinion based its result on Title VII statutory law and the lack of evidence that the test itself was flawed.44 Scalia would have gone further. In concurrence, he argued that forcing employers to avoid disparate impact by engaging in intentional discrimination essentially compel race-based decision making that violates the Equal Protection Clause.45
For North Carolina trial lawyers in the Title VII space, pleading the Commerce Clause footing and the 1991 codification from the outset may be a wise strategy. Those same lawyers should expect Callais-flavored constitutional arguments to start appearing in Title VII briefing. Public employers who rely on tests and screening devices should brace for a stretch of enforcement turbulence while the question works its way up. A redistricting case may be turning into a general theory about what Congress may do about discrimination that cannot be proved intentional. While that general theory’s first proving ground was a map, there is no reason to think it will be the last.
VII. Conclusion
For forty years, Section 2 sat behind the door of every North Carolina map room. It was rarely fired, but everyone drawing lines knew it was there. Writing in the days after the decision came down, political scientist Christopher Cooper observed that there is still a gun behind the door; the trouble, he wrote, is that legislators can now ignore it.46 Put more directly, the gun is still there, but Callais took the bullets. In the short run that hardly matters, because the current map has already been pushed about as far as it will go. The reckoning waits for 2031. That year an enlarged delegation will be drawn by legislators who can pursue partisan advantage openly and say so out loud, measured against a federal standard Justice Kagan calls “all but a dead letter.” What remains in the state arena is express constitutional text, a fair elections theory that may be waiting on a different bench, and a pair of judicial elections that will decide who sits on it. The Callais majority tells us that a world in which these claims cannot be proved is cause for celebration.47 The harder question, and the one this state is about to answer with its own data, is whether that world is the one we actually live in.
Endnotes
[1]Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24–109, 608 U. S. ___ (2026) (consolidated with Robinson v. Callais, No. 24–110) (decided Apr. 29, 2026). The slip opinion remains subject to formal revision before publication in the United States Reports; all quotations herein are from the slip opinion.
[2]Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30 (1986).
[3]Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U. S. 684 (2019).
[4]Callais, slip op., at 1 (Alito, J.) (“Section 2 … was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”).
[5]Id.
[6]Id., at 17–18 (a race-based map survives strict scrutiny in this context only if aimed at “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute” (quoting Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U. S. 181, 207 (2023))).
[7]Id., at 26 (“§2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race”); id., at 23 (the interpretation “does not demand a finding of intentional discrimination” but imposes liability “only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred”).
[8] Id., at 26 (“We need only update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text and reflects important developments since we decided Gingles 40 years ago.”); see also id., at 29, 32.
[9]Id., at 3–4 (Kagan, J., dissenting, joined by Sotomayor & Jackson, JJ.) (“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power”; the majority’s “‘updates’ eviscerate the law”; the plaintiff must now prove legislators were “motivated by a discriminatory purpose,” which “as Section 2’s drafters knew, is well-nigh impossible”).
[10]Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U. S. 529 (2013); Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U. S. 647 (2021); Callais, slip op., at 4–6 (Kagan, J., dissenting) (“Today’s ruling is part of a set”; describing the decision as the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act”).
[11]Callais, slip op., at 29 (illustrative maps must not “use race as a districting criterion” and “must meet all the State’s legitimate districting objectives, including traditional districting criteria and the State’s specified political goals,” such as “a target partisan distribution of voters” or “a specific margin of victory for certain incumbents”).
[12]Id., at 30 (“the plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation. In other words, they must show that voters engage in racial bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.”).
[13] Id., at 30 (“[S]imply pointing to inter-party racial polarization proves nothing”); id., at 36 (“If race and politics are not disentangled and a §2 claim is cynically used as a tool for advancing a partisan end, the VRA’s noble goal will be perverted.”); id., at 27 (a litigant “can easily exploit §2 for partisan purposes by ‘repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim’” (quoting Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 602 U. S. 1, 21 (2024))).
[14]Id., at 30–31 (totality inquiry must focus on “present-day intentional racial discrimination regarding voting”; discrimination “that occurred some time ago,” and present-day disparities characterized as the ongoing “effects of societal discrimination,” are “entitled to much less weight”).
[15]Id.
[16]Act of Oct. 22, 2025, N. C. Sess. Law 2025–95 (congressional districts). Redistricting acts are exempt from the Governor’s veto. N. C. Const. art. II, § 22(5).
[17]See Cong. Rsch. Serv., Mid-Decade Congressional Redistricting: Key Issues (2026) (North Carolina bars mid-decade redistricting of state legislative districts; no comparable bar applies to congressional districts).
[18] Bernard Grofman & Thomas L. Brunell, The Art of the Dummymander: The Impact of Recent Redistrictings on the Partisan Makeup of Southern House Seats, in Redistricting in the New Millennium 183–200 (Peter F. Galderisi ed., 2005).
[19]Seat-gain projections following the 2030 Census are analysts’ estimates and depend on final apportionment. See, e.g., Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Univ. of Va. Ctr. for Politics (2026).
[20]Stephenson v. Bartlett, 355 N. C. 354 (2002) (Whole County Provision requires, to the extent practicable, that legislative districts be formed from groupings of whole, contiguous counties).
[21] Id.
[22]N. C. Const. art. II, §§ 3(3), 5(3) (“No county shall be divided in the formation of a senate [or representative] district.”); Stephenson v. Bartlett, 355 N. C. 354 (2002). Note that Harper III itself identified these provisions as among the surviving “objective constraints in the state constitution” when it released the General Assembly to redraw. See infra note 28.
[23]Christopher Cooper, quoted in PW special report: Demystifying the redistricting process, NC Newsline (Aug. 20, 2021) (“There are multiple optimal solutions in terms of which clusters [could form], and then within clusters, there is a whole lot of latitude.”). Professor Cooper teaches political science at Western Carolina University.
[24]Harper v. Hall (Harper I), 380 N. C. 317, 868 S. E. 2d 499 (Feb. 14, 2022). The same opinion rejected the independent state legislature theory and required the General Assembly to conduct a racially polarized voting analysis before drawing legislative districts; the latter holding was separately overruled in Harper III. See infra note 27.
[25]Harper v. Hall (Harper II), 383 N. C. 89, 881 S. E. 2d 156 (Dec. 16, 2022). Precisely, the Court affirmed the three-judge panel’s rejection of the remedial congressional plan, affirmed its approval of the remedial House plan, and reversed its approval of the remedial Senate plan. Id. at 94, 881 S. E. 2d at 162. The 2022 congressional election proceeded under an interim plan drawn by court-appointed special masters.
[26]Harper v. Hall, 882 S. E. 2d 548, 549–50 (N. C. Feb. 3, 2023) (order allowing the legislative defendants’ petition for rehearing). The petition was filed January 20, 2023, within fifteen days of the Harper II mandate. See N. C. R. App. P. 31(a). The Harper I mandate had issued on February 24, 2022, so rehearing of that judgment was time-barred; the new majority could revisit Harper I’s reasoning but could not disturb its judgment, which is why the 2021 congressional plan was never reinstated. See Moore v. Harper, 600 U. S. 1, 11–12 (2023).
[27]Harper v. Hall (Harper III), 384 N. C. 292 (Apr. 28, 2023) (Newby, C. J.). The Court gave three independently sufficient grounds: the constitution commits redistricting exclusively to the General Assembly subject only to express limitations; no judicially discernible or manageable standard exists for determining how much partisan gerrymandering is too much; and adjudication would require policy determinations the constitution does not guide. It further held that the Free Elections Clause, N. C. Const. art. I, § 10, “does not limit or prohibit partisan gerrymandering, or even address redistricting at all,” and that the Equal Protection Clause, id. § 19, is not implicated because partisan gerrymandering does not disturb one-person, one-vote. It also overruled Harper I’s racially polarized voting requirement.
[28]Harper III, 384 N. C. 292 (granting the legislative defendants the opportunity to enact new legislative and congressional plans “guided by federal law” and “the objective constraints in the state constitution located in Sections 3 and 5 of Article II”).
[29]Moore v. Harper, 600 U. S. 1 (2023) (rejecting the independent state legislature theory). The appeal was taken from Harper I, not from the trilogy’s conclusion; the Court held that Harper III did not moot the case and affirmed Harper I on the Elections Clause question. Harper I was thus overruled in Raleigh and affirmed in Washington, on different questions, ten weeks apart.
[30]Complaint, Bard v. N. C. State Bd. of Elections, No. 24-CVS-003534-910 (Wake Cnty. Super. Ct. filed Jan. 31, 2024); see The American Redistricting Project, Bard v. N.C. State Board of Elections, https://thearp.org/litigation/bard-v-ncboe/.
[31] Id.
[32]See David N. Bass, Orr defends ‘fair elections’ lawsuit against lawmakers’ motion to dismiss, Carolina Journal (May 13, 2024) (plaintiffs included former UNC System President Tom Ross and former state Sen. Allen Wellons; complaint asserts a right “free from the government’s purposeful action to influence or pre-determine the outcome” of discrete elections).
[33]Brief of Charles Thelen Plambeck, Hon. Robin E. Hudson & Joni L. Walser as Amici Curiae in Support of Plaintiffs-Appellants, Bard v. N. C. State Bd. of Elections, No. COA24-1109 (N. C. Ct. App. Feb. 28, 2025) (tracing the asserted right through English constitutional history).
[34]Bard v. N. C. State Bd. of Elections, No. COA24-1109 (N. C. Ct. App. May 20, 2026) (unpublished) (Freeman, J., joined by Stroud & Flood, JJ.) (affirming dismissal; dismissing legislative defendants’ cross-appeal seeking attorney’s fees).
[35]Order, Bard, No. 24-CVS-003534-910 (Wake Cnty. Super. Ct. June 27, 2024) (Foster, Puckett & Gore, JJ.) (issues raised are “clearly of a political nature” with “not a judicially discoverable or manageable standard by which to decide them”).
[36]Id. (“Plaintiffs rely on an unenumerated right to fair elections as the limitation on the General Assembly’s authority to gerrymander on a partisan basis. However, we are constrained to reviewing whether the act of the General Assembly violated an express constitutional provision.”).
[37] Brandon Kingdollar, North Carolina Court of Appeals rejects ‘fair elections’ lawsuit, NC Newsline (May 21, 2026) (quoting Orr’s reaction to the ruling and reporting that he does not expect his clients to seek discretionary review).
[38]Id.
[39]Off. of Legal Counsel, U. S. Dep’t of Justice, Constitutionality of Disparate-Impact Liability Under Title VII (June 9, 2026); see The Blast Radius of Callais—and What It Means for Constitutional Law, SCOTUSblog (June 2026).
[40]Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U. S. 424 (1971); Civil Rights Act of 1991, Pub. L. No. 102-166, codified in relevant part at 42 U. S. C. § 2000e-2(k).
[41]See Trump Administration Says Callais’s Logic Applies to Title VII’s Disparate Impact Provisions, Election Law Blog (June 2026) (noting that Callais construed Congress’s Fifteenth Amendment enforcement power, while Title VII rests principally on the Commerce Clause, with the Fourteenth Amendment invoked to abrogate state sovereign immunity).
[42]Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, 427 U. S. 445 (1976); see also Nevada Dep’t of Human Res. v. Hibbs, 538 U. S. 721 (2003).
[43]Ricci v. DeStefano, 557 U. S. 557, 594 (2009) (Scalia, J., concurring).
[44] Id., at 592.
[45] Id., at 594–596 (Scalia, J., concurring).
[46]Christopher Cooper, The Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Decision Doesn’t Mean Much for N.C.—Yet, The Assembly (May 6, 2026) (“There’s still a gun behind the door, but thanks to Callais, legislators can ignore it.”).
[47]Callais, slip op., at 31.
