The Wisconsin Law Review just published this article by James Piltch. Here’s the abstract:

Academics, policymakers, and judges alike almost universally agree that local subdivision preservation and compactness serve essential roles in redistricting. They often argue—and other times accept as given—that these criteria simultaneously protect against partisan gerrymanders and ensure nonpartisan communities receive the representation they deserve.

This support is a normative and practical puzzle. It is well established both that local governments and their subdividing lines often create segregation and inequality and that compact communities reflect the same issues. Indeed, existing empirical research also finds that these criteria undermine partisan fairness and competitiveness—the stated goals of election law reform.

This Article shows that these flaws, when taken seriously, undermine the normative and political neutrality of these redistricting criteria. Building on this observation, it makes the novel argument that redistricting should abandon these criteria because they honor and empower exclusionary communities while reducing the fairness and competitiveness of elections. This Article argues for replacing subdivision preservation and compactness as the primary redistricting criteria with a partisan fairness metric, as well as a geographically and conceptually expanded idea of communities of interest. Ultimately, this Article calls for a new conversation about which partisan and nonpartisan communities deserve representation in redistricting and how election law reformers and map-drawers can take new approaches to delivering that representation.