Maureen Edobor: “Making Sense of the Supreme Court of Virginia Oral Argument in the Redistricting Case”

If you were looking for a clean, decisive takeaway from the Virginia Supreme Court’s redistricting argument this week, you won’t get one. What you got instead was a case where almost everything is up for grabs as the Court grapples with many questions of first impression.

As one justice put it from the bench, the Court is “writing on a blank canvas.” There is no Virginia precedent squarely resolving whether a special session can persist across a general session, no authoritative interpretation of “next election” in this constitutional context, and no clear rule for what happens when a statutory notice requirement fails because a single local official doesn’t comply.