SLoG

A few weeks ago Mason, Ohio voted to make itself a new kind of “sanctuary city” by banning abortions and threatening to punish anyone who aids or abets an abortion within the city limits. Mason is not alone—it is part of a growing movement of local governments passing ordinances declaring themselves “sanctuaries for the unborn.” On their face, these ordinances seem almost silly. Towns like Mason or Lubbock, Texas clearly don’t have the legal authority or capacity to co

Cross Posted at the Niskanen Center This book review is about people v. place-based policies at the federal level (and Congress) but, because there is a good bit about inter-governmental relations, I thought it would be of interest to SLOG-Law readers, so I'm cross-posting it. -- DS David Wessel’s Only the Rich Can Play : How Washington Works in the Gilded Age is sure to enter the pantheon of Washington, D.C., books that explain the complicated, exciting, and messy ways b

We’ve lifted up the work of SLoGLaw Blog contributors Rich Briffault and Erin Scharff on punitive pre-emption in earlier posts of this blog, and Sarah Swan provided a troubling case study out of Florida where the state tried to authorize the Governor and his handpicked Cabinet to reach in to local law enforcement budgets. Now comes an example out of California that shows the malicious result when industry (in this case, Big Sugar) gets enmeshed in undermining the imperio

Montgomery, Alabama, seat of state government, site of the famous Bus Boycott that helped launch the Civil Rights Movement, and home to civil rights warriors like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy, is in the midst of another struggle, this time over the name of a street. For over half a century , the west side of Montgomery sported the incongruous intersection of Jeff Davis Avenue and Rosa L. Parks Avenue. One street named for the Confederate Presiden

This is the last in a four part series. SLoGLaw thanks Chris Elmendorf and Tim Duncheon for this timely treatment of the important issue of affordable housing for California, and urban regions around the country--Ed. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires state and local agencies that have discretion to choose among possible options to study environmental effects before making their choice. In theory, this leads to better agency decisions. (A contestable cla

Here is Part 3 or this four-part series: The HAA prevents cities from denying or reducing the density of housing projects, but it doesn’t exempt projects from environmental review under CEQA. CEQA spells out time limits for the completion of environmental reviews, but as yesterday’s post explained, those limits have proven illusory in court. So if a city wants to deny a project that the HAA protects, what’s to keep the city from laundering the denial, as it were, through CEQ

In yesterday’s post , we asserted that the recent denial of a downtown housing project in San Francisco portends a generational clash of super-statutes, with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) facing off against the state’s Housing Accountability Act (HAA). In subsequent posts, we will explore the particulars of the CEQA-HAA conflict, as illustrated by the saga of the San Francisco project. Today, however, our goal is simply to show that CEQA and the HAA both hav

Late last month, observers erupted in fury when San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted down a proposal to build nearly 500 new homes -- many affordable -- on a downtown site now being used for valet parking. The Board’s vote came short on the heels of a major Court of Appeal decision upholding the state’s Housing Accountability Act (HAA), which the Legislature has greatly strengthened in recent years. The HAA usually requires cities to approve housing projects that a r

This last July, the Michigan Supreme Court dusted off an obscure canon of statutory construction to resolve a high-profile case involving the City of Detroit’s efforts to revise its charter. The canon, codified by Article 7, section 34 of the Michigan Constitution , calls for the powers of local governments to be “liberally construed.” In theory, such a canon, which is contained in several other state constitutions or statutory home-rule grants (for instance, those of Kansa

Ithaca, New York made headlines recently with its announcement that it would fully decarbonize its buildings . The city’s Energy Efficiency Retrofitting and Thermal Load Electrification Program is part of the Ithaca Green New Deal, which has a goal of carbon neutrality for Ithaca by 2030 . In the past several years, a number of other local governments have taken steps toward decarbonizing the building stock by either banning natural gas hookups in new homes , or by amending

ProPublica recently published a heartbreaking, maddening, and deeply upsetting story about a local juvenile court and justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee. Make the time to read the article, if you can. I won't attempt to summarize it in detail, but the gist is that a local juvenile court judge, working with police and other local officials, unlawfully abused and jailed children over the course of decades, seemingly in violation of state and federal law, and basic

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

I thank the editors of SLoG Law Blog and of course my interlocutors for their spirited engagement with the arguments put forth in my recent book, City, State As I said in accepting the Stein Rokkan Prize for comparative social science research, writing a book of this scope on a vitally important yet understudied topic at the intersection of public law and comparative politics, requires tremendous devotion and research. It is therefore exceptionally gratifying to see it gene

Ran Hirschl’s City, State identifies a silence among constitutional law experts in Western countries with respect to the implications of massive urbanization for constitutionalism. By engaging with newer and more flexible constitutions in countries of the Global South, Ran Hirschl’s City, State invites innovative constitutional thought about how to overcome “stagnation” in Western countries’ constitutionalism. Canada is presented as a kind of “worst” case of constitutional

In Ran Hirschl’s book, “Human rights cities” and “human rights cities movement” are described within “city self-emancipation initiatives” developed to enhance the constitutional relevance of cities in a context dominated by State (158, 162-164). “These developments”, he says, “embryonic as they are, may have significant symbolic, educational, and at times practical significance” (170). Definitely, they demonstrate the awareness some cities have about the role they can play in

As law professors who teach state and local government law are among the regular readers of this site, it seems like a good place for people to announce the availability of new editions of case books. Hope to see more announcements of this type soon! Lynn Baker, Clay Gillette and I are releasing Local Government Law: Cases and Materials, 6th Edition from Foundation Press. It will be published in December and available for your Spring 2022 course. If you have any question

The 21st Century is hailed as the “ Century of the City ” as more than half of the world population is now living in urban areas, which is set to increase to three-fourths by 2050. With urban population almost doubling in the last quarter of the century, we have been witnessing and undergoing a fundamental transformation in the way our society and economy are organized. However, our constitutional visions, institutions, and doctrines have largely failed to acknowledge or resp

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

When Founding Editor Sheila Foster proposed a book symposium on Ran Hirschl’s new work City-State: Constitutionalism and the Megacity , we at SLoG thought it was a lofty project for us state and local types, who don’t usually spend a lot of time thinking about transnational constitutionalism. Right here in the US we are dealing with disempowered cities that are home to 85.9% of the nation’s population and in 2018 produced 91.1% of its GDP. The New York metropolitan area, our

On November 2, residents of Minneapolis will vote on Question 2 – a proposition to amend the city charter to transform the Police Department into a Department of Public Safety that employs a “comprehensive public health approach to the delivery of functions” related to public safety. While the proposition defers specifics of implementation to subsequent negotiations between the mayor and the city council, the Question contains two explicit changes from the status quo. First,