When the United States Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act meant to preserve minority voting power, it sent shockwaves throughout the political landscape. 
In the 6-3 ruling – handed down Wednesday – the court determined that Louisiana’s creation of a second majority-Black district in the state amounted to an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
With the nation embroiled in an ongoing battle over the extent to which public institutions can consider race to remedy past injustices and ensure equal protection under the law, legal scholars have been railing the high-court’s ruling as one that could set the nation back by diluting the voting power of racial minorities at not just the state level, but potentially in local elections as well.
Here’s what various legal scholars have been saying about the decision.
Kristen Clarke, the Earl C. and Anna H. Broady Chair at Howard University School of Law, said in a statement issued in her role as NAACP legal counsel that the ruling “defies precedent, ignores statutory text, and will reverse decades of progress we have made as a nation.”
“This will embolden lawmakers in former slave-holding states to target and eradicate districts that have provided Black Americans a fair opportunity to elect candidates of choice, and they will do so with the blessing of this Court,” Clarke stated. “It ignores the tremendous sacrifice made by Americans who bled and died for passage of the Voting Rights Act.”
Sam D. Hayes, assistant professor of politics and policy at Simmons University, wrote in an article for The Conversation that the timing of the case “carries major implications for the 2026 midterm elections.”
“The decision, by weakening the Voting Rights Act, could make it easier for states to draw partisan gerrymanders of their congressional districts that reduce the power of minorities,” Hayes wrote.
Speaking to POLITICO, Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School and former Biden White House adviser for democracy and voting rights, said it will be “not just hard, but really really really hard” to bring future challenges to the Voting Rights Act “in any states that allow partisanship to infect the process.”
Richard L. Hasen, the Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law Professor of Political Science at UCLA, told NPR that it's important to keep in mind that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act – the provision of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court rendered ineffective – applies “not just to congressional maps but to state legislatures, to city councils, to school board elections – any place where there's racially polarized voting where whites and minority voters prefer different candidates and minority voters have not had a chance to elect their candidates of choice.”
Hasen predicted that Republicans and Democrats alike in state legislatures will break up concentrations of minority voters to help their political party. “And so the losers are going to be the minority voters as well as the American people,” Hasen said.
Matthew Lebo, a political science professor at Western University in Canada, told CBC News that the ruling means the “most significant voting rights legislation in American history has been made nearly completely impotent.”
“The justices are pretending racism is dead,” Lebo said. “Well, the effect is the country's representation is going to look more and more like it used to with discriminatory practices in voting and representation.”
Travis Crum, a professor of law at Washington University School of Law, wrote on Election Law Blog that the effects of the ruling could come sooner than many people expect.
“In ordinary times,” Crum wrote, the impact of the decision “would not be felt until the next redistricting cycle.”
“But these are not ordinary times,” Crum wrote, “and the country is in the midst of a mid-decade redistricting war that will accelerate its impact.”
