The Supreme Court cleared the best way on Monday for a problem to Louisiana’s congressional map to advance, elevating the possibilities that the state will quickly be required to create a second district that empowers Black voters to pick out a consultant.

In lifting an almost yearlong maintain on the case, the justices stated {that a} federal appeals court docket in New Orleans ought to assessment the case earlier than the 2024 congressional elections in the state. By stopping a problem to the map from advancing whereas it thought-about a similar case in Alabama, the Supreme Court had successfully allowed a Republican-drawn map to enter impact in Louisiana through the 2022 election cycle.

Though Louisiana’s inhabitants is about 30 p.c Black, the six-district map enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature has just one district with a majority of Black voters.

Monday’s announcement got here after the court docket issued a surprise ruling this month within the Alabama case, discovering that lawmakers there had undercut the voting energy of Black constituents. It is now more and more anticipated that challenges in Louisiana and different Southern states will finish with redrawn maps that every one however assure an extra district decided by Black voters.

Changes to congressional maps in Louisiana and Alabama might reverberate nationally and increase Democratic possibilities of reclaiming management of the narrowly divided House. After the Alabama ruling, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted two Louisiana House seats from solidly Republican to tossups in anticipation of latest district strains being drawn within the coming months.

Civil rights teams and Democrats hailed the Louisiana order on Monday, framing it as a matter of illustration. Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, stated that the case was “about simple math, basic fairness and the rule of law.”

“I am confident we will have a fair map in the near future,” he stated in a statement.

The case now heads again to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a court docket with a conservative popularity.

In a press release, Assistant Attorney General Angelique Freel, the civil division director on the Louisiana Department of Justice, stated, “Our job is to defend what the Legislature passed, and we trust the Fifth Circuit will review the merits in accordance with the law.”

The map has been mired in political and authorized controversy for the reason that redistricting course of started after the 2020 census, the place one measure discovered that the state’s Black inhabitants had grown by 3.8 p.c, in contrast with a 6.3 p.c decline in white residents.

Mr. Edwards vetoed the map in March 2022, citing considerations about unfair illustration, however the Legislature overrode his veto. A coalition that included the N.A.A.C.P. Louisiana State Conference, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and 9 Louisiana voters challenged the map in court docket shortly after.

Last June, Judge Shelly D. Dick of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana struck down the map for being racially gerrymandered, ordering lawmakers to redraw it and create a second district that held a majority of Black voters.

Judge Dick, nominated to her seat by President Barack Obama, stated that the state’s bloc of Black voters had both been improperly packed into the Second Congressional District or cut up among the many state’s 5 remaining districts, lowering their sway outdoors the only majority Black district.

Adam Liptak contributed reporting.