A panel of federal judges rejected a congressional district map in North Carolina, calling it a partisan gerrymander. Never before has a court overturned a Congressional districting plan on grounds of partisanship. The panel ordered the state legislature to redraw the map.

Gerrymandering, a practice which manipulates district boundaries for political gains, is a much-debated topic in the political sphere. In this episode, Professors Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang discuss what’s next for North Carolina and the practice of gerrymandering in general.

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has been one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the author of several books including, most recently, "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society." Zelizer is a frequent commentator in the international and national media on political history and contemporary politics. He has published more than 600 hundred op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.com.

Wang is professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University. He is known for his books "Welcome to Your Brain" and "Welcome to Your Child's Brain" and for his founding role at the Princeton Election Consortium, a blog providing U.S. election analyses. In 2004, Wang was one of the first to aggregate U.S. presidential polls using probabilistic methods. He has also developed new statistical standards for partisan gerrymandering. A neuroscientist, Wang's academic research focuses on the neuroscience of learning, the cerebellum.