Janai S. Nelson

The Court had set aside an hour. The argument ran about two and a half, through J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, the Solicitor General of Louisiana, for the state; Edward D. Greim for Phillip Callais and the eleven other voters who had challenged the map; Hashim M. Mooppan for the United States as amicus; and Nelson again in rebuttal.

Press Robinson

Press Robinson, Edgar Cage, Dorothy Nairne, Edwin René Soulé, Alice Washington, Clee Earnest Lowe, Davante Lewis, Martha Davis and Ambrose Sims, with the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and the Louisiana State Conference of the NAACP, sued Louisiana's secretary of state on March 30, 2022, over the congressional map the legislature had enacted that year, which left Black voters able to elect their candidate in one district of six. The Legal Defense Fund brought the case with the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Louisiana, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and the Louisiana lawyers John Adcock and Tracie Washington. After a hearing in May 2022, Judge Shelly D. Dick of the Middle District of Louisiana enjoined the map on June 6, 2022, and ordered a remedial plan by June 20. The Supreme Court stayed her order on June 28 while it decided Allen v. Milligan; it decided Milligan for the Alabama voters on June 8, 2023, and lifted the Louisiana stay on June 28. The Fifth Circuit heard the state's appeal on October 6, 2023, and on November 10 gave the legislature until January 15, 2024, to enact a plan of its own.

The legislature met in January 2024 and passed Senate Bill 8, which added a second district in which Black voters could elect their candidate: District 6, joining Baton Rouge and Shreveport along the Red River and Interstate 49. On January 31, 2024, twelve voters led by Phillip Callais sued in the Western District of Louisiana and called the district a racial gerrymander. A three-judge court heard them from April 8 to April 10 and enjoined SB8 on April 30, 2024, Judges David Joseph and Robert Summerhays in the majority and Judge Carl Stewart dissenting; on May 15, 2024, the Supreme Court stayed that order under Purcell v. Gonzalez, and Louisiana voted under SB8 that November. The Court noted probable jurisdiction on November 4, 2024, heard argument on March 24, 2025, and on June 27, 2025, ordered the case reargued. On August 1 it added a question: whether the state's intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment. Nelson's name leads the counsel on the Robinson parties' supplemental brief of August 27, 2025, with Stuart Naifeh as counsel of record, and she took the reargument herself.

Eighty-Four Percent

The two claims were measured by different tests. Under Thornburg v. Gingles, decided in 1986, a vote-dilution plaintiff must show a minority population large and compact enough to form a majority in a district, politically cohesive, and usually defeated by a white majority voting as a bloc, and then that the totality of circumstances leaves the political process unequally open. A racial-gerrymandering plaintiff must show that race predominated over traditional districting criteria in the drawing of a district, which brings strict scrutiny. Nelson put the constitutional line between the two in a phrase: "the dividing line between motivation and general awareness." A legislature may know where communities live and how they vote and may test whether a plan cures dilution; race becomes suspect when it controls the lines.

Justice Alito asked whether the polarization in Louisiana's elections was racial or partisan, and whether incumbent protection counts as a traditional criterion. Nelson answered from the Robinson record: racially polarized voting above 84 percent, more than the 70 percent the Court had found in Gingles, and analyses showing white Democrats declining to vote for Black Democratic candidates. Justice Sotomayor raised Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard; Nelson called it an entirely different case and said it remains constitutional to use race to remedy identified discrimination. Justice Gorsuch asked whether a court may intentionally discriminate by race in a remedy; Nelson said it is not for a court to discriminate, and that a proven violation may require "limited use of race" to cure it. When Justice Jackson asked whether the Court should revisit the Gingles preconditions, Nelson said it should not, and that "Section 2 is not a remedy in and of itself": it measures a violation, and the remedy must then satisfy the Constitution.

A Self-Limiting Statute

Justice Kavanaugh asked when race-based remedies would end. "There should not be a time limit," Nelson said, and Section 2 does not require a race-based remedy in every case; the statute is "self-limiting," since liability depends on current proof of compactness, cohesion and bloc voting, and plaintiffs who cannot show those conditions lose. Section 2 cases, she told the Court, had fallen by half over the previous decade. Congress wrote a durational limit into Section 5 of the Act and wrote none into Section 2. Justice Barrett asked whether the congruence-and-proportionality test of City of Boerne v. Flores governs; "Boerne should not apply to Section 2," Nelson answered. Justice Kagan asked what would follow if Section 2 stopped operating in redistricting. Nelson called the results catastrophic and said that in Louisiana every Black member of Congress had been elected from an opportunity district.

She also gave the Court a way to rule for the Robinson voters without approving every line of SB8. If the Court found the district itself wanting, it should remand and let the state "use one of the many alternatives that are available," maps that answered the Section 2 violation and met the Constitution at once.

Room 209

Nine years earlier Nelson had argued the Voting Rights Act to a full court of appeals. Texas's Senate Bill 14, enacted in 2011, required a voter to show one of seven forms of photo identification, among them a driver's license, a passport, a military card and a concealed-handgun license, and accepted no student or employee card. Imani Clark, a registered voter in Waller County and a student at Prairie View A&M University, had voted with her Prairie View student identification; she did not own or drive a car and had no driver's license. On August 26, 2013, the Legal Defense Fund and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr intervened for Clark and the Texas League of Young Voters Education Fund in the Corpus Christi Division of the Southern District of Texas, where Representative Marc Veasey's plaintiffs and the United States had already sued. Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos tried the case over two weeks with about forty witnesses and struck the law down on October 9, 2014, finding that it had been enacted with discriminatory intent and that more than 600,000 registered Texans lacked an identification it accepted.

Nelson had returned to the Legal Defense Fund in June 2014 as Associate Director-Counsel, and the en banc appeal fell to her. At 9 a.m. on May 24, 2016, in Room 209 of the John Minor Wisdom courthouse at 600 Camp Street in New Orleans, she argued for Clark and the League before the fifteen judges of the Fifth Circuit, with thirty minutes a side. On July 20, 2016, the court, in an opinion by Judge Catharina Haynes, affirmed the finding that SB 14 had a discriminatory effect on Black and Latino voters in violation of Section 2, noted that Texas had produced two convictions for in-person voter impersonation out of twenty million votes cast, and directed the district court to put interim relief in place before the November 2016 election. It returned the discriminatory-purpose finding for reweighing, and on April 10, 2017, Judge Ramos found again that Texas had adopted SB 14 with the purpose to discriminate. The November election, Nelson said when the en banc decision came down, would proceed "without Texas's racially discriminatory photo ID law casting a shadow on its integrity."

Eighth Director-Counsel

Nelson graduated from New York University and externed at the Legal Defense Fund in 1995, while a student at the UCLA School of Law, where she took her J.D. in 1996. She clerked for Judge David H. Coar of the Northern District of Illinois and Judge Theodore McMillian of the Eighth Circuit, and in 1998 came back to the Fund on the Fried Frank fellowship, hired as an assistant counsel by Elaine Jones. She spent a Fulbright year at the Legal Resources Center in Accra, Ghana, studying political disenfranchisement, and taught for nearly ten years at St. John's University School of Law, as a full professor and associate dean for faculty scholarship and as associate director of the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development, with courses in election law, voting rights and constitutional law and articles on gerrymandering and race in the New York University Law Review and on the census in the Columbia Law Review.

She returned in June 2014 as Associate Director-Counsel, leading the Political Participation Group, which carries the Fund's voting-rights and redistricting cases, and served as interim director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, the research arm she helped launch. In March 2022 she succeeded Sherrilyn Ifill as the eighth President and Director-Counsel. She also helped launch the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program, which trains civil-rights lawyers committed to practicing in the South.

12:35 p.m.

When Nelson rose for rebuttal, she returned to Milligan. Twenty-eight months earlier, she said, the Court had made it "pellucidly clear" that Section 2 is constitutional and that a Section 2 plaintiff's illustrative map need not be race-neutral, and much of what the Court had heard that morning had been answered there. Louisiana had turned down a map each time it was offered one that met or beat the state's own criteria while giving Black voters an equal opportunity to elect. The Robinson court had found that no Black candidate had been elected to statewide office in Louisiana; in 2019 white Democrats had won statewide while Black Democrats lost. "This is about race," she said. The state's Black members of Congress had come from Section 2 opportunity districts, many of them crossover districts, and Section 2 "plays a deterrent effect," she said; states draw their maps with it in mind. Congress, in the 1982 amendments, had struck a careful balance, letting a court find a violation from results without "making the full accusation" of intent. She cited Bush v. Vera for the Court's own caution about changing its decisions in a sensitive political context, and she returned to the record: the challengers had not shown that Milligan and Gingles met the Court's tests for overruling a precedent, and nothing in the record supported rewriting Section 2. Any further narrowing of the statute, she said, would "resurrect the Fifteenth Amendment as a mere parchment promise," and she asked the Court to remand. At 12:35 p.m. Chief Justice Roberts said the case was submitted.