The 1981 New Jersey redistricting and the subsequent court overturning

[muon2]

This redistricting is one of the most important since it resulted in Karcher v Daggett (1983). The opinion lays out a good bit of the history of that map.  The 1982 map was part of the record, so if you have access to the full printed volume of cases from that period, it should be there. As an interesting side note in the case, footnote 4 references the "Affidavit of Samuel A. Alito, Executive Director of the Office of Legislative Services of the New Jersey Legislature". He was 31 at the beginning of 1982 when the map was approved.

[muon2]

And in case anyone was curious, the offending population deviation was 0.7%.

but without any justification for why there was that deviation, when moving a few towns (still intact) would have cut it to 0.4%.

[muon2]

The case, in one sentence: "(T)he population deviations among districts, although small, were not the result of a good faith effort to achieve population equality."

The real problem was that they had passed a map in 1981, but then the blacks in Newark objected that their percentages were too low. They had to wait for the 1981 legislature to be seated in Jan 1982 and then rushed out a new plan to satisfy Newark. That rush resulted in larger deviations elsewhere that might have been reduced had they spent more time on the map.