It was the final round of questions and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest member of the US supreme court, had one final thing to ask.
For nearly an hour, Edmund LaCour, Alabama’s solicitor general, had been laying out the case for why his state’s congressional map did not discriminate against Black voters. The plaintiffs in the case, Merrill v Milligan, showed it was possible to draw a map with two majority-Black districts instead of one, but LaCour argued that was only possible if a mapmaker went out of their way to consider race. He argued that was inconsistent with the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which guarantees all citizens, regardless of their skin color, are treated equally under the law.
