Elbridge Gerry was a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Massachusetts, a delegate to the constitutional convention and a member of the first two U.S. Congresses. He died in 1814 at the age of 70 while serving as James Madison's vice president.

It was clearly a distinguished life, but if Gerry is remembered today, it is because he gave his name to a famed beast of political mythology. During Gerry's tenure as governor of Massachusetts, his political supporters tried to draw the state's election districts along lines that favored their party. The districts were so distorted that one resembled a salamander. It became known to cartoonists, pundits and the Jeffersonians' opponents as a Gerrymander. That word became the term that means carving up political districts to favor one cause or another.

So, the controversy that now swirls about Maryland's redistricting map - thrown out by the state Court of Appeals last week - is literally as old as the country itself. Those in power have always drawn the lines and, unsurprisingly, they usually do it to favor themselves.

The British publication The Economist points out in a recent article that all democracies adjust their election districts to reflect population changes but that most hand the job to independent commissions. In America, the magazine states, "that idea sounds elitist and undemocratic." So the politicians do the job. "The results are as bizarre as you would expect," the article states.

Nothing that went on in Maryland might meet the bizarre threshold. For that, you could look to the congressional district in Florida that was 90 miles long and less than three miles wide, or the odd-shaped district in Chicago that joined two widely-separated Hispanic neighborhoods. But it was clear throughout this once-a-decade redistricting process that the Maryland politicians drawing the lines wanted to protect themselves and, here and there, punish some opponents. Still, there are far fewer such shenanigans than in the past.

Matthew Crenson, a professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University, says the 1964 Supreme Court decision that mandated the one-person, one-vote concept on states - meaning districts had to be essentially the same size - and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that ensured minority representation meant that politicians no longer had such a free hand

"Back in the early 19th century, redistricting had a much bigger impact than it does today," says Crenson. "Those redistricters did not operate under the same constraints."

Before the one-person, one-vote decisions, rural counties had disproportionate representation in state legislatures. Crenson says the city of Baltimore finally got the representation it deserved in the 1970s. Now, with its population declining, attempts to preserve Baltimore's representation - by drawing districts that cross over the line between the city and Baltimore county - may have endangered this redistricting plan.

Crenson says that while courts throwing out plans is unusual in Maryland, it is not at all uncommon across the country. What surprises James Gimpel of the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park is that it was a court appointed by Democratic governors that threw out a plan drawn by a Democratic administration and approved by a Democratic-controlled legislature.

"That seems a little unusual," Gimpel says. "These kind of challenges are more common when you have the judiciary and the executive and legislative branches from opposite parties. The judiciary ... for the sake of credibility, needs to assert its independence from time to time."

Gimpel says that courts do not go far enough when they enter the redistricting fray because they don't force changes in districts designed to protect the status quo. , "The courts ought to enforce a competitive criteria, to draw district lines that maximize the political heterogeneity rather than the homogeneity of districts."

The result, Gimpel argues, would be a rejuvenation of the democratic process. "We don't need more entrenched, safe incumbents from either party," he says. "What we need are people who actually face the threat of sanction from the electorate at the polls if they behave badly."

Such an approach would fly in the face of some of the stances courts and legislatures have adopted in the past. Maryland's constitution calls for districts that respect community boundaries, and perceived violations of that measure are thought to be at the basis of the Court of Appeals objections. And the federal Voting Rights Act calls for districts designed to elect minority candidates by grouping those minorities in districts.

The irony in that latter provision is that it has made allies of African-American and conservative Republican incumbents in redistricting battles. The black officials want to keep their districts heavily black to increase the chances of their re-election. The Republicans go along with that because they want to keep the blacks out of their districts to, likewise, increase their odds. The Democratic establishment would like black voters' support more evenly distributed to help a variety of Democratic candidates.

The argument that Gimpel and others make is that black voters would have more clout if they were spread among several districts. The thinking goes like this: If blacks made up 30 percent of the electorate in three districts, then you would have three legislators trying to win their votes. If all those blacks are grouped in one district, then there is only one concerned with their votes - and two probably opposed.

Not all agree with that philosophy. Ronald W. Walters of the James McGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland says he has researched the matter and found that issues traditionally more important to African-Americans are more likely to get legislative attention if there is a black-dominated district that elects a black than in situations where blacks represent under 40 percent of the vote in districts that elect whites.

He says this is particularly true in the South, something he attributes to polarization of voters - the white voters elect a candidate who is not concerned with so-called black issues.

Moreover, Walters points to the importance of having some faces of different colors in legislative bodies.

"There are two kinds of representation," he says. "One is symbolic; the other is substantive. ... It is very important to see black faces in a legislative body. It give people a feeling of ownership, of participation they couldn't have otherwise."

Crenson thinks this redistricting controversy might be much ado about not very much.

"There is less at stake here than meets the eye," he says. "If you look over the long run, and several political scientists have, the effects of redistricting only changes votes by about 1 percent - adding 1 percent to one party and taking that from the other - and that effect fades rather quickly and usually disappears about five years after redistricting. People move, incumbents for whom the districts were designed, retire, things like that."

And those who seek to draw lines to their liking would do well to consider the fate of Elbridge Gerry. He was elected Massachusetts governor in 1811 and re-elected in 1812. It was during that second term that his party started carving up districts to keep control of the state. Gerry lost the next election.