The Eleventh Circuit, the federal appeals court covering Georgia, Alabama and Florida, vacated the Northern District of Georgia's judgment against SB 2EX, SB 1EX and HB 1ES on Tuesday 25 August. It remanded three consolidated appeals for reconsideration under Louisiana v. Callais.1 The three acts are Georgia's current congressional and legislative plans; the district court had ruled against them, and that ruling is now gone.
An unpublished order of this kind selects nothing. It removes the standing federal judgment against the plans Georgia already has and hands the question back to the judge who decided it, under a standard the Supreme Court has since altered. The same precedent had kept Tennessee's redrawn lines in place five weeks earlier. Two states, two courts, one recent decision doing the same work in both.
