The gerrymandering ruling suggests that some academic work might be needed

The decision essentially says that they have no way to draw a line and say that a result is too partisan. It might be that work should be done to look at how various principles could be used to drive a computer process that could draw the lines based on agreed upon rules.

It would be great if there were federal guidelines that called for states to use bipartisan panels and that they would use agreed upon goals. A computer could maximize the stated goals. Currently, computers are already using computers to maximize an unacceptable goal of having the most seats likely to go to the majority party. Selecting the goal or set of goals would be an interesting.

For instance, here are two obvious goals:

1) Keep communities of interest within the same district - maximizing the homogeneity of the voters meaning they likely have similar interests.
2) Make the percent of seats that favor a party is as close as possible to the percent of voters in the state that favor that party.

Consider a fictitious state that has one large urban area surrounded by a rural area. Further assume that a third of the state lives in the urban area which is 90% Democratic and the rural are is 60% Republican/40% Democrat. This made up state is 56.1 percent Democratic and 42.9 percent Republican.

Using each of the two goals, you get different roles. If the districts are designed by communities of interest, you would end up splitting the urban area over 1/3 of the districts and the remaining 2/3 over the rural areas. Meaning the Republicans get 2/3 rds of the seats even as 56.1% of the state is Democratic.

The second way, would create districts that end up with as close as possible to 56.1 percent of the seats being Democratic.

My fear is that the Republicans COULD use the first goal stated as I stated it to 'pack' the district. They might also argue that this will help minorities have minority majority districts. ( something that was argued in the past) It should be noted that because of the concentration of Democrats in cities, this is easier for Republicans to do. Both of these reasons sound reasonable and in fact, laudable, when the real impact is that they get extra seats.

Caveat - My example was designed to demonstrate the problem mentioned. 60/40 makes the rural area hard to win. In reality, there is likely urban, suburban, and rural.