Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP

Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 11, 2023 Decided May 23, 2024
Full case name	Thomas C. Alexander, in His Official Capacity as President of the South Carolina Senate, et al., v. The South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, et al.
Docket no.	22-807
Questions presented
(1) Whether courts must apply a presumption of good faith to a legislature's racial intent when considering a challenge to legislative districts; (2) whether courts must disentangle race from politics when considering such challenges; (3) whether courts must consider a district's compliance with traditional districting principles before finding that the legislature predominantly considered race when drawing districts.
Holding
The District Court’s finding that race predominated in the design of District I in the Enacted Plan was clearly erroneous.
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Clarence Thomas · Samuel Alito Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan Neil Gorsuch · Brett Kavanaugh Amy Coney Barrett · Ketanji Brown Jackson
Case opinions
Majority	Alito, joined by Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett; Thomas (except part III-C)
Concurrence	Thomas (in part)
Dissent	Kagan, joined by Sotomayor, Jackson
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amends. XIV, XV

Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 602 U.S. ___ (2024), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding racial gerrymandering and partisan gerrymandering within South Carolina's 1st congressional district, which includes most of Charleston.

Redistricting maps were drawn by the Republican-led legislature purportedly to increase Republican representation within the district, but had the impact of moving African-American voters out of the district. The local chapter of the NAACP sued, claiming the map was racially gerrymandered and unconstitutional. The three-judge district court ruled in favor of the NAACP, and South Carolina appealed the case directly to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the finding of the district court that race had predominated in the legislature's decision was not sufficiently supported by evidence, reversing that finding as clear error and remanding the case to the district court for further consideration.

It was the first partisan gerrymandering case taken by the Supreme Court after its landmark decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) which stated that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts, and the first racial gerrymandering case after the court's landmark decision in Allen v. Milligan (2023).^[1]