The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed on Monday that Congress abrogated state sovereign immunity in the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The original complaint filed by the Alabama NAACP alleged that Alabama’s “at-large election method[s] for the Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals and Court of Civil Appeals [violate] Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.” Section 2 of the VRA prohibits states from instituting racially discriminatory election practices. The complaint notes that not a single judge position at any of these three courts has been filled by an African-American in the last fifteen years.

The State’s appeal claimed that under the Eleventh Amendment private citizens, like the NAACP, could not sue the state in federal court. The court rejected this claim and referenced the Fourteenth Amendment as the source of power that allows Congress to nullify state sovereign immunity to protect against state discriminatory practices. The court’s analysis relied on a two-prong Supreme Court test:

To determine whether Congress abrogates state sovereign immunity, we ask whether Congress (1) expressed its unequivocal intent to do so and (2) acted “pursuant to a valid grant of authority.”

The two-judge majority found that the VRA passed this test and thus Alabama could not be immune to suit under it by a private citizen. Judge Elizabeth Branch dissented, emphasizing the strength of state sovereign immunity and the unbounded precedent the majority was setting.