Cooper v. Harris
Whether North Carolina's legislature unconstitutionally relied on race as the predominant factor when it redrew Congressional District 1 and Congressional District 12 after the 2010 census, making them illegal racial gerrymanders in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Decision
5-3 decision · Opinion by Elena Kagan · 2017
Majority Opinion— Elena Kaganconcurring ↓dissent ↓
In a 5–3 decision authored by Justice Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court affirmed the district court's ruling and struck down both District 1 and District 12 as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined the Court after oral arguments, did not participate in the decision.
Regarding District 1, the Court held that race was unquestionably the predominant factor because the legislature had explicitly adopted a racial target: it instructed its mapmaker to ensure the BVAP exceeded 50%. The more difficult question was whether this use of race survived strict scrutiny — meaning whether the state had a compelling interest that justified it. The state argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required a majority-minority district. The Court assumed, without definitively deciding, that compliance with Section 2 could qualify as a compelling interest. However, the Court held that a state invoking this defense must demonstrate a 'strong basis in evidence' that Section 2 actually required the race-based action taken. Here, the evidence showed that Black candidates had consistently won elections in District 1 even when the BVAP was below 50%, which undermined any claim that a crossover coalition was insufficient and that Section 2 demanded a majority-Black district. The legislature's mechanical reliance on a 50% racial threshold, without genuine analysis of whether legally significant racially polarized voting existed, was not enough.
Regarding District 12, the central dispute was whether race or partisanship explained the district's composition. The Court emphasized that the district court's factual finding — that race predominated — could only be overturned if it was 'clearly erroneous,' a deferential standard. The majority found ample evidence supporting the lower court's conclusion. The legislature's mapmaker had testified that he relied on racial data when drawing District 12's lines, and statistical analyses showed that the racial composition of the district could not be explained by partisan goals alone. The Court rejected the state's argument that because race and party are correlated, any use of racial data should be presumed to be partisan. When direct evidence shows mapmakers used race, courts are not required to accept an alternative partisan explanation.
The decision was significant because it clarified two important principles. First, a state cannot invoke the Voting Rights Act as a blanket justification for racial line-drawing; the state must show that its actual legal interpretation of the Act was correct, or at least well-founded. Second, the Court reinforced that trial courts' factual findings in racial gerrymandering cases deserve significant deference on appeal, making it harder for states to escape adverse rulings by recharacterizing racial motives as partisan ones.
Concurring Opinions
Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority opinion in full but wrote a separate concurrence to reiterate his longstanding view that strict scrutiny should apply whenever race is used in redistricting, and to express skepticism about the assumption that compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can ever constitute a compelling governmental interest sufficient to justify racial classifications in drawing district lines.
Dissenting Opinions
Samuel Alitojoined by John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy
Justice Alito argued that the district court committed clear errors in its analysis of both districts. For District 1, he contended the legislature reasonably believed Section 2 required maintaining a majority-minority district, and for District 12, the evidence pointed to partisanship rather than race as the predominant factor in the mapmaking process.
- For District 1, the legislature's decision to set a racial floor above 50% was a reasonable, good-faith interpretation of the Voting Rights Act's requirements, and courts should not second-guess legislatures that try in good faith to comply with federal anti-discrimination law.
- For District 12, the close correlation between race and political party in North Carolina meant the district court should have credited the alternative partisan explanation — the mapmaker was packing Democrats, and the racial effects were a natural byproduct of partisanship, not a racial goal.
- The majority improperly deferred to the district court on contested factual questions where the evidence was ambiguous, effectively allowing a lower court's characterization of legislative motive to become nearly unreviewable.
- The decision would chill state legislatures from taking race into account even when they sincerely and reasonably believe the Voting Rights Act demands it, creating a legal trap between the VRA's requirements and the Equal Protection Clause's prohibitions.
Background & Facts
After the 2010 census, the North Carolina General Assembly redrew the state's thirteen congressional districts. Two of those districts — District 1 in the northeastern part of the state and District 12 running through the central Piedmont region — had long been majority-minority districts, meaning Black voters made up a majority or near-majority of the voting-age population. In the new maps, the legislature significantly increased the Black Voting Age Population (BVAP) in District 1 from roughly 48% to over 52%, and maintained District 12 as a majority-Black district. Both districts were redrawn in ways that moved large numbers of Black voters in and white voters out.
Two North Carolina voters, David Harris and Christine Bowser, filed a lawsuit challenging both districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. They argued that the legislature had used race as the predominant factor — above traditional redistricting criteria like compactness, contiguity, and keeping communities together — when drawing the lines for both districts. For District 1, the state defended its actions by claiming it needed to raise the BVAP above 50% to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which prohibits election practices that dilute minority voting power. For District 12, state legislators argued that the lines were drawn primarily for partisan political purposes — to pack Democratic voters into the district — and that any racial effects were incidental.
A three-judge federal district court, as required by law for redistricting challenges, heard the case (originally captioned Harris v. McCrory). The court ruled in favor of the challengers on both districts. It found that race predominated in the drawing of District 1, and that the state had not shown a sufficiently strong basis for believing Section 2 actually required such a high racial target. For District 12, the court found that racial considerations, not partisan ones, drove the mapmaking, relying on extensive evidence including the testimony of the legislature's own mapmaker.
Because redistricting cases decided by three-judge district courts are appealed directly to the Supreme Court, the state — now represented under the name of newly inaugurated Governor Roy Cooper — brought the case before the justices. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal to resolve important questions about the standard courts should use when evaluating racial gerrymandering claims and the circumstances under which compliance with the Voting Rights Act can justify race-based line-drawing.
The Arguments
The state argued that its redistricting decisions were constitutionally permissible. For District 1, the legislature was acting to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and for District 12, the lines were drawn based on partisan politics, not race.
- For District 1, the legislature had a compelling interest in ensuring compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which it believed required maintaining a BVAP above 50% to prevent minority vote dilution.
- For District 12, race and party affiliation are so closely correlated in North Carolina that the district court wrongly attributed partisan motivations to racial ones — the mapmaker's goal was to pack Democrats, not Black voters specifically.
- The district court applied too demanding a standard and failed to give appropriate deference to the legislature's reasonable interpretation of its obligations under the Voting Rights Act.
The challengers argued that race was the predominant factor in drawing both districts and that the state had no legally sufficient justification for its race-based decisions, making both districts unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
- The legislature explicitly set a racial target of 50%-plus BVAP for District 1, which proves race was the predominant factor, and the state's interpretation of what Section 2 required was legally incorrect.
- For District 12, direct evidence — including the mapmaker's own statements and the district's bizarre shape — showed that racial data drove the line-drawing process, not mere partisanship.
- Even if compliance with the VRA could justify some use of race, the state must show it had a strong basis in evidence that the VRA actually required the specific racial thresholds it imposed, which it could not do here.