New York Times

WASHINGTON — At a Supreme Court argument on Wednesday about procedures in redistricting cases, the justices appeared to be trying to reconcile two conflicting impulses. They did not want to close the door entirely on challenges to gerrymandering, but they also did not want to be required to rule on them.

Though the court has never rejected a voting district on the ground that it gave a political party an unconstitutional advantage, it has never ruled out that such a district might exist. On Wednesday, the court seemed inclined to endorse procedures that would at least treat such claims seriously by sending them to special three-judge courts created by a federal law for redistricting cases.

But as the argument drew to a close, several justices voiced a competing concern — the law also allows direct appeals to the Supreme Court from rulings of the three-judge courts, meaning more work and less discretion for the justices.

The case, Shapiro v. McManus, No. 14-990, is a challenge to Maryland’s 2011 congressional maps. Democrats, the challengers said, had gone to elaborate and unconstitutional lengths to create oddly shaped districts to favor their candidates.

A single federal trial judge dismissed the case, saying it did not present issues serious enough to warrant convening a three-judge court. In the first part of the argument, several justices seemed to disagree.

“They want to raise about as important a question as you can imagine,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer said of the challengers. “And if they are right, that would affect congressional districts and legislative districts throughout the nation.”

The argument was unusually sleepy, lasting 47 minutes instead of the usual hour and going for long stretches without questions from the bench. As it neared the end, it took a turn, with justices raising concerns about their workload and their ability to shape their own docket.

“There are a lot of cases that come up in three-judge district courts that would be the kind of case — I speak for myself, anyway — that we might” decide not to review if they arrived in the usual course, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said. “With the three-judge district court, no, we have to decide it on the merits.”

Justice Breyer echoed that point. “If there is a set of cases where this court should be careful as to when and how and which it enters in which order,” he said, it is those involving sensitive political issues.

“If we accept your view,” he told Michael D. Kimberly, a lawyer for the challengers, “we have to take immediately whatever variations on the theme of disproportionate gerrymandering, whatever order they happen to arise and whenever they happen to arise, because we have no choice.”

Much of the discussion concerned how legally tenuous a claim had to be before single judges could act on their own.

Chief Justice Roberts did not seem satisfied with the available distinctions, which he said created “an awfully fuzzy line” and gave no guidance to judges.

Justice Elena Kagan said the category of cases in which a judge could act alone should be very narrow if the test is whether the court has jurisdiction to hear the case at all. “We’ve basically said that’s only when it’s completely ridiculous,” she said, one where “it’s just a laughingstock of a case.”

Steven M. Sullivan, a lawyer for Maryland, created some confusion with a description of the sorts of cases so frivolous that any judge should be entitled to dismiss them. “It’s easy when it’s the little green men and the extraterrestrials,” he said.

That was probably a reference to Justice David H. Souter’s dissent inAshcroft v. Iqbal, a 2009 decision that made it easier to dismiss all kinds of lawsuits at the outset. (It is appropriate, Justice Souter wrote, to dismiss “claims about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel.”)

But the reference seemed lost on Justice Antonin Scalia, who asked several questions about how extraterrestrials figured in the case.