I have no view at this stage whether the majority is correct that six districts in Texas’s re-redistricting are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The dueling opinions are long; the issues are highly fact dependent. But I wanted to note that the decision is based on the anti-racial gerrymandering doctrine that the Court first established in Shaw v. Reno (1993).

At the time Shaw was decided, many voting-rights groups were sharply critical of the decision. But in the years since, Shaw has been used successfully over and over again by voting-rights groups and their allies to invalidate racially gerrymandered maps. In the Texas case, the lead plaintiff was the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which has been the major group litigating on behalf of Latino voting rights in Texas for decades.

If the majority is indeed right that these districts were racially gerrymandered, it would be far more difficult, and frequently impossible, to invalidate them on some other basis in the absence of Shaw’s constraint on racial gerrymandering. In Texas, the plaintiffs also brought vote dilution and intentional discrimination claims. But racial gerrymandering frequently happens without vote dilution taking place. And voting-rights plaintiffs have long been concerned about the difficulty of proving intentional discrimination.

The court decided the Texas case based on Shaw and the racial gerrymandering claims precisely because those claims are easier to prove. Having invalidated the districts on that basis, the court did not address these other claims.