The Unmaking of Section Two

Authors

• Maureen Edobor, Washington and Lee University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Essay

Publication Title

Minnesota Law Review

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act now stands at a paradoxical crossroads. Though it remains the statute’s central protection against racial vote dilution after Shelby County v. Holder, it is increasingly undermined by a constitutional framework that treats race-conscious remedies as suspect rather than necessary under Section 2. This Essay argues that Section 2 is being quietly unmade—not through direct invalidation, but through the convergence of Equal Protection Doctrine, racial-gerrymandering jurisprudence, and an ascendant commitment to colorblind constitutionalism. Tracing the Fifteenth Amendment’s original design and Congress’s expansive enforcement authority, the Essay situates Section 2 within a constitutional tradition that authorized race-conscious, prophylactic legislation to dismantle entrenched systems of political exclusion.

The Essay then shows how the Supreme Court’s modern redistricting cases, beginning with Shaw v. Reno, have displaced that tradition by importing Fourteenth Amendment anticlassification principles into a domain governed by the Fifteenth Amendment. This doctrinal shift has produced a structural contradiction: The evidentiary showing that compels a remedial district under Section 2 increasingly supplies the factual predicate for a constitutional challenge to that very remedy.

Examining Allen v. Milligan alongside the Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the Essay demonstrates that Section 2 has officially been unmade. Callais recasts compliance with Section 2 as constitutionally suspect while declining to grapple with the statute’s remedial origins or purpose. In doing so, the Court collapses the Fifteenth Amendment into a colorblind vision of the Fourteenth and misidentifies the relevant constitutional conflict as one between Section 2 and the Constitution itself, rather than the internal tension the Court has created between Congress’s Fifteenth Amendment enforcement authority and its own anticlassification jurisprudence.

Recommended Citation

Maureen Edobor, The Unmaking of Section Two, 110 Minn. L. Rev. 2631 (2026).