Localism

Co-Cities by Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione is a tour de force. They provide a rigorous empirical analysis of more than 200 global cities, and over 500 case studies within those metropolises, to reconceptualize “the city” for the contemporary age. (p. 24) While many scholars theorize or hypothesize “the city,” Foster and Iaione use surveys, qualitative interviews, detailed case studies, fieldwork, and geo mapping to derive a new and informed urban governance theory. Co-C

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

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

As NYC Slashes School Budgets, Art Teachers Are Feeling the Squeeze (hyperallergic.com) Uvalde Schools’ Police Chief, Criticized Over Mass Shooting Response, Quits City Council - WSJ Is your dishwasher repairman packing heat? The case for ‘no carry’ gun defaults on private property | The Hill New York Moves to Enshrine Abortion Rights in State Constitution - The New York Times (nytimes.com) St. Paul's new basic income project: $12K cash plus college funds (twincities.com)

Are the legislatures of local governments too small? Once one looks beyond some major cities, one sees councils, boards, and commissions that have, mostly, fewer than ten members. The Census Bureau’s most recent comprehensive study (1992) on the size of general-purpose local legislatures gave an average size of four members, and a less comprehensive 2018 survey by the International City/County Management Association reported that 90% of these bodies have seven or fewer member

The Perils of Land Use Deregulation , my intervention in the land use/housing debate, has now been published by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review . This article has already attracted some critical attention , including by others on this blog , and—as with all things housing-related these days—the disagreement can be sharp. No one will mistake an 80-page article on land use for a tweet. But I suspect hot takes are inevitable because I challenge the anti-zoning consensu

This post is based on a presentation for the 2021 North Carolina Law Review Symposium "Home Rule in the 21st Century" The NLC HR21C proposal is astoundingly comprehensive, covering more aspects of home rule than its predecessors. As constitutional language alone, if adopted in toto, it would likely be the wordiest constitutional home rule provision on home rule among the states. But the proposal need not be an all-or-nothing proposition. Rather, states can and should consi

Daniel Farbman is Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College Law School. This post is based on his presentation for the 2021 North Carolina Law Review Symposium "Home Rule in the 21st Century" Right now, Georgia is the poster-child for what ails our localism. On the one hand, the new “election integrity” law in Georgia gives the state legislature the power to take over election administration from any county it chooses to. This provision is clearly aimed at large urban coun

In 2020, the National League of Cities (NLC) published the Principles of Home Rule for the Twenty-First Century , a groundbreaking new vision of local-government legal authority to match the increasingly central role that cities play in our contemporary system of governance. (I was on the drafting team, along with Richard Briffault, Nestor Davidson, Paul Diller, Sarah Fox, Laurie Reynolds, Erin Scharff, and Rick Su.) The Principles includes a model home rule constitutional

Last week’s tropical storm Ida was another stark reminder of the realities of climate change and how vulnerable our infrastructure is to...

I could not be more excited about helping to bring this blog to life with this amazing group of scholars. For those of us who are...