Elbridge Gerry was governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812. During his term, his party produced an artful electoral map intended to maximize the number of seats it could eke out of its expected vote share. Contemporary observers latched onto one district in particular, in the shape of a salamander, and pronounced it a Gerry-mander.

This book is about a unique episode in the long history of American gerrymandering – the Supreme Court's landmark reapportionment decisions in the early 1960s and their electoral consequences. The dramatis personae of our story are the state politicians who drew congressional district lines, the judges on the courts supervising their handiwork, and the candidates competing for congressional office. The plot of our story concerns the strategic adaptation of these actors to the new electoral playing field created by the Court's decisions.

In writing our story, we have incurred numerous debts. Here we thank some of those we should, with apologies to those we have inadvertently forgotten. For conversations about and comments on our project, we thank R. Michael Alvarez, Bruce Cain, Andrea Campbell, Chris Den Hartog, Andrew Gelman, Dave Grether, Bernie Grofman, John Mark Hansen, Simon Jackman, Gary Jacobson, Sam Kernell, D. Roderick Kiewiet, Gary King, Morgan Kousser, Mat McCubbins, Mike McDonald, Jonathan Nagler, Steven Smith, Matthew Spitzer, Simon Wilke, and participants in seminars given at Princeton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Riverside, the Hoover Institution, Northwestern University, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Harvard University, and the University of Rochester. For research assistance, we thank Chris Den Hartog, Mike McDonald, Meredith Rolfe, and the Reference Law Librarians at the University of Chicago.