But you can't have very unusually shaped districts, as we did last time.

Some said they were confident that the courts would eventually let the oddly shaped districts stand because they make Congress more reflective of the nation's diversity.

The district is a very irregularly shaped district that generally runs along Old Norwich Road.

But the trial has now produced a ruling upholding those strangely shaped districts, suggesting that the voting law may still be very much alive.

A group of white voters there say that an oddly shaped district is unconstitutional because it was drawn to guarantee the election of a black representative.

The Republican-controlled legislature had created district boundaries designed to enhance their party's control over state and national offices, leading to some oddly shaped legislative districts.

Its immediate object is two goofily shaped districts with bare black majorities.

The line drawing produced a strangely shaped district 160 miles long and in places only an Interstate highway wide.

Two years ago the Court said that oddly shaped districts that helped black candidates were constitutionally suspect.

This provision alone would bring an end to the disjointed and abnormally shaped districts created to accommodate the maximum number of voters of one political party.