The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to rehear a decades old voting rights case that established the only majority-Black state supreme court district in Louisiana, according to the court’s docket Monday afternoon.
On Monday, the 5th Circuit granted a petition from the State of Louisiana for a rehearing en banc on Chisom v. State of Louisiana, a gerrymandering lawsuit that stems from the 1980s. In the lawsuit, Black voters argued the Louisiana Legislature gerrymandered the Louisiana Supreme Court districts by packing Black neighborhoods into majority-white districts.
After protracted litigation that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the state eventually agreed to a consent judgment in 1992 that settled the case by creating a majority-Black district based out of New Orleans. Associate Justice Piper Griffin currently holds the seat.
However, the state, through then-Attorney General Jeff Landry, moved to dissolve the consent judgment in 2021 ahead of the legislature’s special session on redistricting the following year.
Landry, a Republican who now serves as Louisiana’s governor, argued that the state no longer needs a federal court to force it to comply with the Voting Rights Act. He further argued that the consent judgment was only meant to be temporary and is being incorrectly used as a “perpetual federal check on the State.”