Alex Whitman has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Emory LJ.) Here is the abstract:

For over twenty years, the political gerrymandering claim under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been mired in ambiguity because the Supreme Court and lower courts have failed to come up with a clear standard to determine whether a redistricting plan is unconstitutional. In 2006, however, a new phenomenon that this Comment terms “pinpoint redistricting” was used by Georgia’s Republican-dominated state legislature to alter the boundaries of a small group of districts rather than all of the state’s district boundaries, severely weakening the strength of Democratic voters in the affected districts. The pinpoint redistricting changed the affected districts from competitive to strongly Republican, and as a result, the redistricting party’s candidates achieved sizable victories in the 2006 elections.
In the context of this novel form of redistricting, this Comment proposes a new approach to the political gerrymandering claim. All of the Supreme Court’s previous cases examined political gerrymanders that redrew all of a state’s boundaries and addressed the harm to political groups in statewide terms. Pinpoint redistricting’s effect on a limited number of districts should allow courts to shift to a district-based approach to judge these gerrymanders. Such an approach would be tailored to the facts of pinpoint redistricting, drawing from Justice Stevens’s proposal to adapt the Court’s racial gerrymandering jurisprudence from the Shaw v. Reno line of cases to the political gerrymandering claim, elements of the original political gerrymandering standard from Davis v. Bandemer, and Justice Kennedy’s elusive view on what would be an applicable standard for certain narrowly defined situations. Under this new standard, an extreme political gerrymander, identifiable by the unusual nature of its implementation, would be unconstitutional if partisan intent guided every major aspect of drawing the new district lines and resulted in active degradation of a political group’s electoral strength in a specific district through substantial weakening of the group’s political performance in successive elections. While this standard is designed to correct the danger of pinpoint redistricting, it can serve as a model for an effective district-based approach to future political gerrymandering claims.