Democracy

As an academic, one reads a fair amount of texts. Very few of them give you sheer pleasure throughout the process of reading, while at the same time causing you to rethink and reimagine themes and concepts that you have been otherwise engaged with for years. Co-Cities by Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione is one of these rare gems. Sheila and Christian, two dear friends and colleagues, brilliant scholars, and truly engaged citizens of cities and the world, have written an in

At their core, Michelle Wilde Anderson’s poignant and expertly crafted narratives in "The Fight to Save the Town" are tales of localities in decline. The communities she visits and the people she interviews alternate between resilience, disappointment and despair.  The reader comes away from the book with a deep understanding of what caused the deterioration of the four localities Anderson has studied, but also with admiration for the individuals and organizations that have

San Jose Gun Insurance Law Going Into Effect – NBC Bay Area Brown forgives uncollected traffic fines to allow driver license reinstatement – Oregon Capital Chronicle D.C. home rule imperiled by Kevin McCarthy speaker fallout - Axios Washington D.C. After pandemic, mental health crisis challenges legislatures - Pluribus News Mayors Introduce Global Declaration for Democracy | Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation (gmfus.org) Jacksonville drops appeal of redistricting ruling,

City of Chester, Pennsylvania, Files For Chapter 9 Bankruptcy (bloomberglaw.com) Haywood voters elect unexperienced college student as new tax collector | News | themountaineer.com California homeowners pay for violations they didn’t commit – Orange County Register (ocregister.com) A quarter of local election officials received violent threats after 2020 election, survey finds – Oregon Capital Chronicle The People Fleeing Austin Because Texas Is Too Conservative (nymag.co

Rural areas to get $759M in grants for high-speed internet (msn.com) Cities Weigh Value of AI-Powered Gunshot Detection Tech - Bloomberg In California Cities, a New Frontier for Public Financing of Elections | Bolts (boltsmag.org) Private Companies Helped Ruin Jackson’s Water (levernews.com) Black Families Fall Further Behind on Homeownership | The Pew Charitable Trusts (pewtrusts.org) Plus a bonus story: Secretaries of state warn 'independent state legislature theory' would

Murphy Says NYC Congestion Pricing Can’t Burden NJ Taxpayers - Bloomberg California Law to Cut Public Meeting Disruptions - Bloomberg Federal Monitor Investigating How Arsenic Got Into NYCHA’s Water - THE CITY 'It's a disgrace': West Baltimore residents demand action on contaminated water - CBS Baltimore (cbsnews.com) Teddy Bears and Racial Justice: How St. Louis Became a Laboratory for Social Work - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Michigan’s high court puts abortion quest

Durham’s unarmed first responders are making an impact, data shows :: WRAL.com Conservatives’ Federal Case Challenges Immigrant Voting — Using Ex-Council Members’ Own Words - THE CITY NYC's Rise of Low-Level Arrests Worry Critics of 'Broken Windows' Era - Bloomberg New 'Stability' Housing Vouchers for Homeless, At-Risk Families - Bloomberg Lakewood NJ cut down Town Square trees to deter homeless (app.com) Jackson water crisis deepens as state deploys National Guard (msn.

What Croydon, a ‘Live Free or Die’ Town, Learned About Democracy - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Climate Activists Pivot to Local Action, Frustrated by Washington Gridlock - Bloomberg Newsom to Sign Bill Allowing Residents to Sue Over Illegal Guns - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Deadly heat: US cities are hiring 'chief heat officers' as they face increasing heat threat - CNN Pittsburgh passes three bills to protect reproductive freedom (pittsburghpa.gov) Oklahoma T

Meryl Chertoff, Executive Director, Georgetown Project on State and Local Government Policy & Law, Adjunct Professor of Law I have just finished reading Leah Litman and Kate Shaw’s really excellent takedown of the independent state legislature theory (ISLT) and the decision of the North Carolina Supreme Court that was granted cert as Moore v. Harper — Harper v. Hall which could be the case that decides if the Court will accept ISLT as a doctrine governing the relationship o

The US Supreme Court has agreed to consider the inde­pend­ent state legis­lature theory in the case Moore v. Harper, a case decided as...

What abortion restrictions and laws look like in every state in the U.S. (19thnews.org) Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoes local business 'protection' bill (floridapolitics.com) Mayors and Local Officials Face a Rising Tide of Threats, Harassment - Bloomberg Governor Hochul, U.S. Department of Interior and Onondaga Nation Announce One of the Largest Returns of Land to an Indigenous Nation by Any State | Governor Kathy Hochul No, Texas Can’t Legally Secede From The U.S., Despite Pop

American influence has a new address on State Street - POLITICO Ellison says MN to protect out-of-state abortions if Roe falls (twincities.com) Justices seem poised to hear elections case pressed by GOP | AP News What a New Chesapeake Bay Bridge Could Really Cost - Bloomberg Supreme Court Gun Ruling 'Frightful In Its Scope': Hochul | Yorktown, NY Patch A Digital Map to Net Zero, Via Upstate New York - Bloomberg North Dakota’s Small Schools Fight for Survival (governing.com)

Diverging Paths to Challenging Gerrymanders: Past Results and Possible Outcomes Ohio and New Jersey are far from the only states to have their maps challenged in partisan gerrymanders. In this second installment, I examine other ongoing cases. While two are based on specific prohibitions against partisan gerrymandering, the others are based on state constitutional provisions relating to elections or suffrage. Others still are based on even broader provisions, like equal prot

While some of our readers are deep in the weeds on redistricting after Rucho v Common Cause , the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision that allows the continuation of partisan gerrymandering in legislative redistricting, others may be less immersed, focusing on their home state, or monitoring a state that will be key in the 2024 Presidential election. Since we’re all about local and state, SALPAL’s inaugural State and Local Justice Fellow, Kathryn Randolph, provided an overview of w

Today's installment includes stories from outside the United States, along with domestic stories that touch on some of the most timely issues in the country right now. Check out these articles below: “Why Ukraine’s Best Hope Lies With Its Cities” The Brennan Center for Justice’s Local Election Officials Survey suggests that all is not well And “Florida is set to create a new police force to investigate elections” Tennessee is trying to take over a small, majority Black

The Little-Known Violence Prevention Tool Cropping Up in Cities Across the Country Barbershop Confrontations, Profane Signs and Despair: Pro-Biden and Alone in Rural What’s Wrong with Privately Funded ‘Post-Industrial’ Parks? America 25% of Missouri School Districts Now Provide Education Only Four Days A Week Also in Missouri, a “lawmaker seeks to stop residents from obtaining abortions out of state” And Idaho is using a similar tactic in its recent anti-trans bill, whic

Russell Wheeler, Visiting Fellow, Governance Studies Program, The Brookings Institution. This is an abbreviated and updated version of a recent article for Lawfare Efforts by former President Trump to reverse the 2020 election included a litigation blitzkrieg. As USA Today summarized : “[o]ut of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential election, 61 have failed.” Although dramatic, the assertion is somewhat misleading. Based on all judicial votes, Trump performed s

“Red states are remaking the civil liberties landscape” Like here, where Texas targets trans kids …and Texas has important District Attorney elections coming up A Tennessee County spends its American Rescue Plan Act relief funds on jails And also in Tennessee, gerrymandering rips Nashville apart “Black City. White Paper.” The Philadelphia Inquirer takes a hard look at itself and how its “coverage has helped maintain discriminatory status quos within the city’s other ins

James Madison is famous for many things, but chief among them was his distaste of direct democracy. Madison believed that popular sovereignty was best realized through representative government, and that direct democracy enabled majority faction, fueled destructive populism, and empowered self-interested demagogues. Indeed, in Federalist 55, Madison (or perhaps Hamilton) quipped that “had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been

In his latest book, Ran Hirschl has once again set out to expand our constitutional imagination, this time calling on constitutionalists to reckon with the unrelenting reality of urbanization. His core thesis is that the constitutional status of cities needs to be strengthened to ensure that cities are able to do all we expect of them. In this short intervention, I address two points related to this core treatise: first, how much of a change in status we should be looking for