Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Way Toward a Voting-Rights Compromise

The Supreme Court decides a Virginia case that gives judges leeway when ruling on race-based redistricting.

March 1, 2017 at 7:18 PM UTC

Corrected

March 2, 2017 at 4:02 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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In an important decision that’s unusual for being almost unanimous, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday clarified the constitutional rule for the design of majority-minority legislative districts, perhaps the single most significant issue in contemporary voting-rights law.

The districting in this case took place under the old rules, before the court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act. But the decision points the way to the constitutional doctrine of the future: voting-rights law that’s more consensual than has been the historic norm.