Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday told lower courts to take another look at a pair of cases involving whether private individuals and groups can sue to enforce a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits discriminatory voting practices.

In brief orders, the high court set aside lower court decisions and sent the cases back for further proceedings in light of its landmark ruling last month weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

At issue in the disputes is who can bring lawsuits in federal court to address potential violations of Section 2. The cases are the latest test of the 1965 law and threaten to sharply curtail who can sue to enforce Section 2. Future decisions embracing those limits could further undermine the landmark voting law, long considered the crown jewel of the civil rights movement.

The latest court fight involving Section 2 arrived at the Supreme Court through two different cases challenging legislative maps drawn in Mississippi and North Dakota after the 2020 Census as violations of Section 2.

The case from Mississippi was brought by the state's chapter of the NAACP and 14 voters, and in the North Dakota dispute, it was the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, the Spirit Lake Tribe and three Native American voters who sued. Both sets of plaintiffs prevailed before district courts. 

North Dakota officials appealed the lower court's ruling to the U.S. Appeals for the 8th Circuit, which found that Section 2 cannot be enforced by private plaintiffs suing under a different civil rights law, known as Section 1983. That law allows people to sue government actors in federal court for alleged deprivation of their rights.

In siding with North Dakota officials, the three-judge panel from the 8th Circuit applied an earlier ruling in which it held that when Congress crafted the Voting Rights Act, it only intended for the attorney general, not private parties, to enforce Section 2. The 8th Circuit's decision covered only the states within its region: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

But lawyers for the Native American tribes argued that its ruling departs from more than 40 years of unbroken practice of individuals suing in courts throughout the country to vindicate their rights under Section 2.

A review of cases brought under Section 2 by Ellen Katz, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, found that since 1982, private plaintiffs have been party to 96.4% of Section 2 claims that led to published decisions and the only litigants in 86.7% of those opinions. 

Additionally, from 1982 to early 2024, private plaintiffs brought more than 400 cases alleging violations of Section 2 that have led to judicial decisions, while the Department of Justice brought more than 40, government lawyers under former President Joe Biden's administration said in 2024.

"Everywhere else in the nation, private plaintiffs can rely on an unbroken line of Supreme Court and circuit precedent to enforce the individual rights given to them by Congress in the Voting Rights Act. But not in the Eighth Circuit," lawyers for the tribes wrote in a Supreme Court filing.

The appeals court, they said, "extinguished the remaining pathway for private enforcement of Section 2 of the VRA within its bounds."

Meanwhile, the Mississippi case was decided by a three-judge panel, allowing state officials to directly appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. 

Echoing the 8th Circuit's decision, Mississippi officials argued that Congress provided a mechanism enforcing Section 2: lawsuits filed by the attorney general.

"Although Congress had ambitious aims for the Voting Rights Act, its ambitions did not extend to buoying private litigation," they wrote in a filing. "Congress had seen that private litigation had failed to vindicate voting rights. It steered a new course in the VRA — embracing powerful remedies, but not private enforcement."