Kavanaugh Floats Time Limit in Another Landmark Civil Rights Law

Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the prospect of extending the Supreme Court’s logic that affirmative action in college admissions needed an “end point” to race-based redistricting.

Such a rationale would represent an enormous step for the conservative-dominated court, legal scholars say, extending a theory on college admissions policies to a civil rights law enacted 60 years ago with the explicit aim of addressing discrimination against Black voters.

Critics argue a key section of the Voting Rights Act already has the sort of time-bound restrictions that Kavanaugh has raised in multiple cases in the past few years. And it also gives rise to questions on just how far the justices could take such a formulation.

“If there’s some sort of temporal limit on Congress’s authority, how long is that limit?” said Travis Crum, a law professor at the Washington University in St. Louis. “The court hasn’t set a bright line rule. And even then, there’s the question of what types of laws are subject to this.”

“If it’s just a general principle for Congress exercising its Reconstruction amendment enforcement authority,” he added, “then it would apply to things like literacy test bans, grandfather clause bans.”

Voting Case

The court’s six conservatives on Wednesday appeared open to further weakening the voting law as they heard arguments in a case over whether Louisiana must take race into account when creating its congressional map.

The central dispute is over whether, under the Constitution, Section 2 of the law can require the intentional creation of heavily minority districts to ensure equal opportunity in voting.

Kavanaugh, who President Donald Trump appointed in 2018, repeatedly raised time limits. At one point, he said Supreme Court cases in a “variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time,” but “that they should not be indefinite and should have a end point.”

Kavanaugh picked up on a line of reasoning that gained the most attention two years ago when a divided court effectively barred colleges from using racial classifications in admissions policies in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The majority decision, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, pointed to a 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger authored by former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor upholding affirmative action policies. O’Connor said at the time that race-conscious admissions policies required narrow restrictions and, ultimately, a “termination point.”

Two weeks before joining the majority in the affirmative action decision, Kavanaugh cast a decisive vote that also upheld a lower court’s decision requiring Alabama to create a second majority Black district.

In a concurring opinion in Allen v. Milligan, Kavanaugh added that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

‘Not Shelby County’

The court’s three liberal justices during Wednesday’s arguments were critical of applying a time limit to the case at issue.

“This is not a kind of Shelby County thing where one could say Congress had acted and 50 years later, you know, the conditions on the ground might have changed,” Justice Elena Kagan said, referring to the court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder striking down a separate section of the voting law on grounds that a formula it called for was outdated.

“What these Section 2 suits do is they ask about current conditions and they ask whether those current conditions show vote dilution, which is violative of Section 2,” she said.

Unlike affirmative action, the law that governs the Voting Rights Act in the context of redistricting already builds in a time frame “based on what’s happening in the world,” said Chicago-Kent College of Law professor Carolyn Shapiro.

Decreased housing segregation and racially-polarized voting, she said, would diminish a plaintiff’s chances of bringing a successful challenge under the law.

But a lawyer for Louisiana, J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, argued that race-based redistricting represents unconstitutional stereotyping and that much has changed since the court in the 1980s set up a test for assessing vote-dilution claims and determining whether lines must be redrawn.

Time limit or sunset provisions are nowhere in the Constitution, said Daniel Harawa, a New York University law professor, noting the concept appears to stem largely from O’Connor saying in 2003 that race-based admissions policies wouldn’t be necessary in 25 years. O’Connor later voiced regret about her wording in Grutter, citing in part continued racial inequities.

“The idea that it is somehow constitutionalized such that it is used in service of overturning affirmative action is one thing,” Harawa said. But Congress invoked its power under the 15th Amendment, in enacting the Voting Rights Act, an amendment that is “racially explicit” in its aims, he said.

It’s hard to know how open other conservative justices are to Kavanaugh’s line of thinking, but he’s not alone, said Crum, citing comments from Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent to the Milligan decision. “He’s not on a hill by himself.”

The case is: Louisiana v. Callais, U.S., 24-109, argument, 10/15/25.