In a lengthy opinion today, a federal court granted a preliminary injunction barring Jacksonville from holding any elections under its newly drawn city council districts. Seven of those districts, the court held, are likely unconstitutional racial gerrymanders: four “packed” districts with Black populations far larger than necessary to comply with the VRA and three “stripped” districts with artificially small Black populations. Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic is litigating the case together with the ACLU of Florida and the Southern Poverty Law Center. A good story about the decision can be found here.

The ruling is noteworthy outside of Jacksonville for a few reasons. First, it involves not just packed districts (the usual targets of racial gerrymandering claims) but also stripped districts. The logic of the cause of action has always applied equally strongly to districts intentionally drained of minority voters, but for whatever reason, such districts have rarely been challenged to date. Second, the ruling is among the first in the racial (as opposed to the partisan) context to rely on redistricting simulations. Kosuke Imai’s expert report showed that when city council maps that satisfy all applicable criteria — including the VRA — are randomly generated, the invalidated districts are outliers in their racial compositions compared to the corresponding simulated districts. Lastly, the ruling squarely rejects “core preservation” as a defense, at least when the prior districts were just as racially gerrymandered as the new ones. As Rob Yablon has pointed out, jurisdictions increasingly claim that partisan and racial gerrymanders are actually aimed at preserving the status quo. This court, at least, wasn’t fooled by this specious argument.