When the Supreme Court heard *Louisiana v. Callais* last week, a moment during oral argument captured national attention. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, pressing counsel on the meaning of discriminatory intent, drew an analogy between Black voters in Louisiana and people with disabilities: “So going back to this discriminatory intent point, I guess I’m thinking of it — of the fact that remedial action absent discriminatory intent is really not a new idea in the civil-rights laws, and — and my kind of paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA. Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible.” ([Supreme Court Oral Argument Transcript, *Louisiana v. Callais*, 2025](https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2025)).

Her words were more than a rhetorical flourish. They signaled a larger truth about the architecture of American civil-rights law: that justice often demands proactive remedies even in the absence of explicit discriminatory intent. When Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), it acknowledged that exclusion was often built into the world itself—curbs without ramps, workplaces without accommodations, schools without interpreters. The ADA’s mandate was not to prove malicious actors, but to make participation possible ([ADA.gov](42 U.S.C. § 12101*).

Justice Jackson’s comparison was bold, and not without controversy. Disability advocates noted that the analogy, while well-intentioned, collapses distinct forms of structural inequity. The ADA addresses barriers that stem from design and neglect; the argument in *Callais* turns on the constitutionality of race-based districting under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ([Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89–110, 79 Stat. 437](https://www.justice.gov/crt/history-voting-rights-act)). Yet both emerge from the same moral premise—that equality cannot exist where participation is denied.

Her invocation of disability law inside a voting-rights argument also re-centers disability within the broader story of civil rights, where it has long belonged. For too long, disability has been discussed as a matter of “special needs” rather than civil rights, a framing that obscures its shared lineage with racial justice movements and the women’s rights movement of the late twentieth century ([National Council on Disability, *Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act*](https://ncd.gov/publications/2010/July26ADA40)). The ADA, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 before it, was a declaration that accessibility is a constitutional expectation, not a favor.

Seen through that lens, Justice Jackson’s words invite the Court—and the nation—to consider how structural exclusion operates across identities. Both race and disability have shaped who gets to move freely, who gets to vote, who gets to be seen as fully part of “the public.” The parallel is not perfect, but it is profound.

As the Court deliberates *Callais*, it will confront a familiar question: how far the Constitution allows us to go in correcting inequality that was never accidental to begin with. The ADA teaches us that sometimes justice requires reconstruction—redesigning systems, spaces, and assumptions so that participation is not the exception but the rule.