Deuel Ross

Alabama emerged from the 2020 census with seven congressional seats. Its November 2021 plan preserved one district in which Black voters formed a voting-age majority. Black residents comprised roughly 27 percent of the state.

The Milligan and Caster plaintiffs submitted eleven illustrative plans prepared by their experts. Every plan retained Alabama’s existing majority-Black district, and at least one additional district in each plan gave Black voters a realistic opportunity to elect their preferred candidate.

The January 2022 injunction described those alternatives as reasonably configured. They met equal-population and contiguity requirements, compared favorably on compactness, and respected counties, precincts, municipalities, and communities of interest while treating the Black Belt as a region with geographic and historical coherence.

Those plans performed a threshold function under Thornburg v. Gingles. They showed that Alabama’s geography could accommodate another opportunity district and allowed the court to test the effect of the enacted district lines.

The three-judge court gave Alabama fourteen days to enact a new plan with an additional majority-Black district or another district affording Black voters an opportunity to elect their preferred representative. A special master would prepare alternatives if the legislature declined.

Seven Days of Evidence

The injunction followed a seven-day hearing held from January 4 through January 12, 2022. Seventeen witnesses testified live. The judges considered more than 1,000 pages of briefing, over 350 exhibits, extensive expert reports, and arguments from 43 lawyers across three coordinated cases.

Section 2 required more than drawing capacity. The plaintiffs had to establish a sufficiently large and geographically compact minority population, political cohesion among Black voters, and white bloc voting usually strong enough to defeat the Black-preferred candidate, followed by the statutory totality of circumstances.

The record showed stark polarization. Black voters supported their candidates of choice at an estimated 92.3 percent rate; white voters supported those candidates at about 15.4 percent. The judges evaluated those figures as electoral evidence under the Section 2 framework.

Geography generated a separate dispute. Plaintiffs joined portions of the Black Belt and Mobile County in configurations their experts regarded as compact communities. Alabama emphasized the Gulf Coast as a distinct community and argued that splitting it distorted legitimate state priorities.

The judges found the Section 2 likelihood of success “not a close one.” They entered a preliminary injunction for the coming election and reserved the constitutional claims.

Voting and Education

Ross’s work at the Legal Defense Fund spans access to elections and equal educational opportunity. He now co-leads its litigation department with Chris Kemmitt as one of two Directors of Litigation. Before joining LDF, he clerked for Fourth Circuit judge Roger Gregory, held an ACLU Karpatkin Fellowship and worked as a Fried Frank associate and Civil Rights–LDF Fellow. He studied at the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

In Connecticut, Ross played a lead role in negotiating the 2022 settlements in Sheff v. O’Neill, the school-desegregation case brought on behalf of Hartford children. The January agreement proposed a long-term plan to expand access to integrated schools, increase available seats and require public reporting on educational equity. Elizabeth Horton Sheff and the families were represented by LDF alongside the Center for Children’s Advocacy, the ACLU, the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, and local counsel.

He led the LDF team in Borel v. St. Martin Parish School Board, where the Fifth Circuit affirmed a desegregation order entered after a 2021 trial. He has taught as an adjunct at Penn and NYU law schools.

The Map That Survived 2022

On February 7, 2022, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction. Alabama used the 2021 plan for that year’s congressional election while full review proceeded.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence emphasized election timing and the Purcell principle against late federal changes. Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from the stay, writing that the district court had properly applied existing precedent even though he regarded that precedent as producing uncertainty.

The merits argument followed on October 4. Ross represented the Milligan appellees. Abha Khanna separately argued for the Caster respondents, and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar appeared for the United States as amicus. The clients, local organizations, mapmakers, experts, and several litigation teams had developed the evidence presented to the courts.

Ross began with the enacted map itself: “There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama’s map.” He argued that its lines divided the Black Belt despite the district court’s findings about the community’s geographic and historical coherence. Alabama’s choices about county splits, incumbents, communities and political aims belonged in the comparison with the plaintiffs’ alternatives.

He defended the existing results test. Section 2 asked whether a standard or practice left minority voters with less opportunity under current conditions. Requiring proof of intentional discrimination would replace the statute Congress enacted with the constitutional theory Congress deliberately supplemented in 1982.

The Race-Neutral Benchmark

Alabama asked the Court to recast the first Gingles inquiry. Illustrative maps should avoid race; the enacted plan should be compared with maps produced through race-neutral simulations; and departures from that benchmark should count only when race supplied the sole explanation.

Alabama invoked simulations produced by plaintiffs’ experts. One generated two million maps without racial data; another generated 30,000. None produced two majority-Black districts. Alabama argued that the eleven illustrative maps reached their result because their designers consciously sought another Black-opportunity district.

A mapmaker could consider race while testing Section 2, but the Equal Protection Clause forbade making race predominant while subordinating traditional districting principles without sufficient justification. Alabama and the principal dissents treated the illustrative plans as crossing that line.

Ross reminded the Court that Alabama itself had criticized simulations for failing to reproduce its map or incorporate all traditional districting criteria. The models depended on their designers’ assumptions. The plaintiffs asked the judges to decide whether a reasonably configured alternative existed; the average output of a computer model could not decide that question.

Kavanaugh asked Ross to answer Alabama’s objection that the proposed district sprawled across the state. Ross pointed to the district court’s compactness findings and to Alabama’s own Board of Education map, drawn at the same time under the same redistricting criteria. That map contained a district of much the same shape.

Ross also separated an illustrative map from a court-imposed plan. Plaintiffs could examine racial data to test whether vote dilution could be remedied while still drawing districts that satisfied compactness, contiguity, political boundaries, and genuine communities. The remedial court would later conduct its own constitutional review.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked whether his reading required states to maximize the number of majority-minority districts whenever they could draw compact ones. Ross answered that drawing an additional district satisfied only one part of the inquiry. Plaintiffs still had to prove polarized voting and satisfy the totality of circumstances. He had told Alito that his clients sought a fair chance to elect their preferred candidate, without a guarantee of the result.

Five Votes for the Existing Test

On June 8, 2023, five Justices affirmed the preliminary injunction. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the controlling opinion; Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined it in full, and Justice Kavanaugh joined all but one section and wrote separately.

The Court rejected Alabama’s proposed rewrite of Gingles. Section 2 neither demanded a race-blind illustrative map nor directed judges to compare an enacted plan with the average simulated plan. The traditional inquiry remained compactness, cohesion, bloc voting, and the complete local record.

Congress had repeatedly amended and renewed the Voting Rights Act while leaving the Gingles framework in place. The majority treated that history as powerful reason to resist replacing a settled results test with Alabama’s new benchmark.

The judgment retained the constitutional requirement that racial considerations remain consistent with traditional districting principles. A state’s communities, political boundaries, and legitimate objectives remained part of deciding whether an additional opportunity district was reasonably configured under Section 2.

Justice Clarence Thomas’s principal dissent and Justice Samuel Alito’s separate dissent disputed the comparator and compactness analysis, emphasizing the plaintiffs’ racial target and Alabama’s Gulf Coast choices. Justice Kavanaugh separately noted a possible temporal limit on race-conscious remedies, an issue not properly presented for decision.

What the 2023 Judgment Decided

Allen v. Milligan sustained the district court’s likelihood-of-success determination after its January 2022 evidentiary hearing. The eleven illustrative maps, polarized-voting evidence and wider local record supported preliminary relief under Gingles and the totality-of-circumstances inquiry. Alabama had to return to mapmaking, with an opportunity to enact a compliant plan before the district court selected a remedy and adjudicated later disputes.

Alabama’s Next Map

Alabama enacted Senate Bill 5 in July 2023. The new plan placed District 7 at 50.65 percent Black voting-age population and District 2 at 39.93 percent. The state conceded that District 2 offered no additional opportunity to elect the Black-preferred candidate.

The three-judge court enjoined that plan in September. It read the 2023 Supreme Court judgment and its own earlier order to require an additional opportunity district, then directed a special master to prepare maps after Alabama chose a plan concededly lacking one.

The special master proposed three alternatives. The court adopted Remedial Plan 3: District 7 had approximately 51.9 percent Black voting-age population and District 2 approximately 48.7 percent. The map contained one majority-Black district and one additional Black-opportunity district.

The cartographer drew without displaying racial-demographic data, relying on counties, municipalities, precincts, the Black Belt, and other criteria. Performance analysis came afterward to confirm electoral opportunity. Alabama used the Special Master Plan in 2024; Shomari Figures won District 2 and Terri Sewell won District 7.

Ross led the Milligan trial team in the later challenge to the 2023 plan. After an eleven-day trial, the court entered May 2025 judgments finding Section 2 violations and intentional discrimination. Those findings supported a permanent injunction until the Supreme Court vacated the judgments and remanded in May 2026.

Callais Changes the Baseline

Louisiana v. Callais changed the Section 2 proof model on April 29, 2026. The first Gingles precondition now required a practicable alternative map drawn without using race as a districting criterion and serving all the state’s legitimate districting interests at least as well as the challenged plan.

Callais required evidence supporting a strong inference that the state had intentionally drawn its districts to give minority voters less opportunity because of race. Without direct evidence of racial purpose, plaintiffs had to rule out race-neutral explanations, including partisan goals. The presumption of legislative good faith remained in place, and polarized-voting analysis had to control for party affiliation.

Historical discrimination remained relevant, but current and recent conditions received greater weight than remote history. The decision narrowed the manner of proving dilution and permissible remediation while leaving Section 2 in force and additional opportunity districts subject to case-specific review.

On May 11, the Supreme Court vacated the Alabama judgments and remanded for reconsideration under Callais, ending the old 25-274 merits proceeding and setting aside the May 2025 judgments.

The district court issued a new preliminary injunction on May 26 after reviewing the record under Callais. It again found likely Section 2 and constitutional violations and ordered continued use of the race-blind Special Master Plan for the remaining 2026 election events, while setting the case for renewed trial preparation.

The June 2026 Stay

On June 2, the Supreme Court stayed the May 26 order at the emergency stage. The majority said Alabama had shown likely success under Callais, faulting the treatment of legislative good faith, Gulf Coast and incumbent interests, partisan voting, and election timing. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented.

The stay suspended the command to use Remedial Plan 3 for the 2026 election pending the further appellate proceedings specified in the order. The litigation had involved three plans: Alabama’s 2021 map, its 2023 legislative replacement, and the court-selected Special Master Plan.

The May 26 district-court order had directed the parties to prepare for renewed proceedings, with a trial-ready target in January 2027. The Supreme Court’s June 2 stay intervened before that stage, leaving the courts to reconsider what the changed legal standard required of the plaintiffs’ proof.