Amos 5:24 But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. https://t.co/WOEq1KdUnt — Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) December 8, 2017

This is quite novel. We are still waiting for the decision in Gill v. Whitford, this year’s big partisan-gerrymandering case before the Supreme Court. However, it turns out it’s just the first case. Now there’s a second one: Benisek v. Lamone.

There are other cases pending in lower courts. Why would SCOTUS take any of them? The first obvious point is that whichever way things go, Justice Anthony Kennedy appears to be intent on laying down a doctrine that spans multiple cases. He may retire this year, and maybe he’s a man in a hurry.

I can think of reasons why the Supreme Court would want to take on the Maryland case sooner (rather than wait until it finishes with Whitford). First, the other cases in North Carolina and Pennsylvania have a certain family resemblance to Gill v. Whitford: they have delegations large enough to have multi-member delegations on both sides – and both are Republican gerrymanders. In a sense, they are redundant. For these cases, it would likely be sufficient to wait for whatever new law is made in Whitford.

Maryland, on the other hand, has novel features. For the politically-minded, it was committed by Democrats. A second ruling, coming soon after Whitford, would nail partisan gerrymandering as a bipartisan offense.

However, the Court may be more interested in a technical issue: there’s only one GOP seat remaining in Maryland. It was gerrymandered by spreading Democrats around as evenly as possible in the other 7 districts. I have offered a test that shows this, but it is distinct from the ones that are offered in a closely-divided state like Wisconsin.

Another way to establish that Maryland was gerrymandered is to look closely at how the districts were drawn. There are few enough districts (only eight) that one could reasonably hope to examine a single district. The focus of the plaintiffs’ case is the 6th, where Democrats were poached from the DC burbs to make it blue. This way of thinking about gerrymandering is not in Whitford.

Finally, there is a *great* human-interest angle. This suit was originally brought by Steve Shapiro, who lacked a law degree at the time. SCOTUS ruled that the lower court had to take him seriously. Now that’s impressive.