The major North Carolina redistricting cases form a connected chain: Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) shut federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims, Harper v. Hall briefly opened state courts to those claims in 2022 before reversing itself in 2023, Moore v. Harper (2023) rejected the Independent State Legislature theory, Cooper v. Harris (2017) struck down two congressional districts as racial gerrymanders, and Louisiana v. Callais (2026) made racial vote dilution claims substantially harder to prove. Together, these rulings explain why the state’s 14 congressional districts remain contested as the 2026 elections approach, and why the legal paths available to map challengers have narrowed sharply over the past seven years.
Rucho v. Common Cause (2019)
The modern chain starts with a case that began as a challenge to North Carolina’s own congressional maps. On June 27, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court held 5–4 that partisan gerrymandering claims are political questions beyond the reach of federal courts.1Supreme Court of the United States. Rucho v. Common Cause Chief Justice Roberts wrote that federal judges have no constitutional authority to reallocate political power between the two major parties and that no judicially manageable standard exists for identifying when partisan advantage crosses into unconstitutionality.
The effect was national and immediate. Voters who believed their congressional districts had been drawn to entrench one party’s power could no longer bring those claims in federal court anywhere. For North Carolina, Rucho meant the General Assembly’s maps could not be challenged on partisan grounds in federal court regardless of how lopsided the partisan tilt appeared. Challengers who wanted a court to police partisanship had one option left: state court, under the state constitution.
Harper v. Hall (2022)
That is exactly where the fight moved. In February 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court held in Harper v. Hall that the state constitution prohibited partisan gerrymandering. The court grounded its ruling in Article I, Section 10 of the North Carolina Constitution, the Free Elections Clause, which reads: “All elections shall be free.”2North Carolina General Assembly. North Carolina Constitution Article 1 – Declaration of Rights The justices read that provision to mean that maps drawn with extreme partisan bias unconstitutionally diminished the voting power of disfavored voters.
The court ordered the General Assembly to redraw its maps. When legislators returned with a congressional plan the court found inadequate, the court adopted an interim congressional map for the 2022 elections.3Justia. Harper v. Hall That interim map produced a 7–7 partisan split in the state’s congressional delegation, a sharp contrast to the 10–4 Republican advantage projected under the legislature’s original plan. The ruling also established statistical tests for measuring partisan fairness. For roughly one election cycle, North Carolina had the most aggressive state-level check on partisan gerrymandering in the country.
Harper v. Hall (2023 Rehearing)
The experiment ended abruptly. After the November 2022 elections shifted the North Carolina Supreme Court from a 4–3 Democratic majority to a 5–2 Republican majority, the newly constituted court granted rehearing in Harper v. Hall. On April 28, 2023, the court overruled its own 2022 decision, holding that partisan gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable political questions under the North Carolina Constitution.3Justia. Harper v. Hall The reasoning tracked what the U.S. Supreme Court had applied to federal courts in Rucho.
The new majority went further. It ruled that the General Assembly’s original 2021 maps had been drawn under a “mistaken interpretation” of the constitution, since legislators had operated under criteria imposed by the earlier court order. The court directed the General Assembly to draw entirely new maps for both congressional and state legislative districts, guided by federal law and the state constitution’s structural provisions rather than any judicially imposed partisan fairness standard. The door to state-level partisan gerrymandering challenges in North Carolina closed.
Moore v. Harper (2023)
While Harper v. Hall moved through state court, the same dispute produced a parallel case at the U.S. Supreme Court that tested an even broader theory. North Carolina legislators asked the Court to adopt the Independent State Legislature theory: the argument that the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution grants state legislatures sole, unreviewable authority over federal election rules, free from any oversight by state courts or state constitutions.4Supreme Court of the United States. Moore v. Harper
The Elections Clause provides that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”5Congress.gov. Article I Section 4 Proponents of the theory read “Legislature” to mean the lawmaking body acting alone, without any check from state judges applying the state constitution. If adopted, the theory would have prevented state courts across the country from reviewing congressional redistricting plans, voter ID laws, mail voting rules, or any other regulation touching federal elections.
On June 27, 2023, the Supreme Court rejected the theory in a 6–3 decision authored by Chief Justice Roberts. The majority held that the Elections Clause does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review. State legislatures retain primary authority to set election rules, but they remain bound by their state constitutions, and state courts remain empowered to enforce those limits.6Oyez. Moore v. Harper By the time the Court confirmed state courts could review redistricting plans, the North Carolina Supreme Court had already decided it would decline to do so on partisan gerrymandering grounds. Moore preserved a power that Harper v. Hall’s reversal rendered largely theoretical in North Carolina for partisan claims.
Cooper v. Harris (2017)
Partisan claims are not the only ground for challenging a map. Racial gerrymandering remains unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause, and North Carolina has sat at the center of that doctrine for years. In Cooper v. Harris, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down two of the state’s congressional districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. The Court found that legislators had used racial targets to pack Black voters into Districts 1 and 12, raising the Black voting-age population in District 1 from 48.6% to 52.7% and in District 12 from 43.8% to 50.7%.7Supreme Court of the United States. Cooper v. Harris
Legislative leaders defended those increases as necessary to comply with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Court rejected that defense for District 1, pointing out that Black-preferred candidates had won there consistently for nearly two decades even when Black voters were less than half the district’s population. A district that already functioned as a “crossover” district, where minority-preferred candidates won with support from some white voters, did not need to be transformed into a majority-minority district to satisfy the VRA.7Supreme Court of the United States. Cooper v. Harris Lawmakers could not invoke the Voting Rights Act as cover for race-based sorting when the evidence did not support a genuine compliance need.
Louisiana v. Callais (2026)
The most recent shift came from outside North Carolina but will reshape its litigation. On April 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais that rewrote the framework courts use to evaluate racial vote dilution claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.8Supreme Court of the United States. Louisiana v. Callais
The core change: Section 2 now imposes liability only when evidence supports a “strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”8Supreme Court of the United States. Louisiana v. Callais Earlier cases used the Thornburg v. Gingles framework, which focused on racially polarized voting patterns and whether minority voters could form a majority in a compact district. Callais does not formally abandon that framework, but it adds requirements that change how each step works:
- Plaintiffs challenging a map must propose alternative districts that would give minority voters a fair opportunity, but those alternative maps cannot use race as a drawing criterion. They must satisfy all of the state’s legitimate redistricting goals, including stated political objectives.
- To show racially polarized voting, plaintiffs must now provide analysis that separates racial voting patterns from partisan ones. If voters who appear to vote as a racial bloc are actually voting along party lines, the claim fails.
- When a state defends its maps as partisan rather than racial, the plaintiff bears the burden of proving race was the driving factor. If either race or politics could explain a district’s shape, the plaintiff loses.
- Evidence of past discrimination and its lingering effects now receives “much less weight” in the totality-of-circumstances analysis. Courts must focus on evidence of present-day intentional discrimination.
The Pending Challenge to the 2025 Congressional Map
Callais arrived at a moment when North Carolina already had an active federal case testing a new map. In October 2025, the General Assembly took the unusual step of redrawing the congressional map through mid-decade redistricting, adopting a new plan under Session Law 2025-95 for use in the 2026 elections.9North Carolina State Board of Elections. Voting Maps/Redistricting A federal lawsuit, North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. Berger, alleges that the new map targets Black voters in the eastern part of the state, reducing the Black voting-age population in Congressional District 1 by nearly eight percentage points and splitting Black communities between two districts in a way that dilutes their collective voting power.
The litigation raises claims under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It will now be evaluated under the Callais standard. North Carolina’s legislative leaders have consistently framed their redistricting choices as partisan rather than racial, and the strong correlation between race and party affiliation in the state makes disentangling the two motivations exactly the kind of problem Callais hands to plaintiffs.
What Remains Available to Challengers
The through-line across these cases is a steady narrowing. Federal courts cannot hear partisan gerrymandering claims after Rucho. North Carolina state courts will not hear them after Harper v. Hall’s reversal. The Independent State Legislature theory was rejected in Moore v. Harper, but that victory for judicial oversight matters less in a state where the courts have voluntarily stepped back from policing partisan maps. Racial gerrymandering claims under the Equal Protection Clause and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act remain available, and Cooper v. Harris shows those claims can succeed. But Callais raised the bar for proving them, and the pending NAACP case will be one of the first real tests of how high that bar now sits.10U.S. Department of Justice. Redistricting Information