State Preemption

Nearly a year ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , the Supreme Court eliminated the federal constitutional limits on government interference with access to pre-viability abortion. It is hardly novel to note that “return[ing] the issue of abortion” to the states has hurt pregnant people nationwide—for many of whom, particularly the most marginalized, abortion access was already nearly impossible. Immediately after the Dobbs opinion leaked, all eyes were on th

Boil notice lifted for Jackson after nearly 7 weeks of water crisis, Mississippi officials announce (nbcnews.com) Michigan charter school spending questioned - Chalkbeat Detroit Gov. Ron DeSantis' Administration Tells Florida Town to Abandon Zoning Reform (reason.com) Chicago Looks to Boost Hiring for People Released From Prison - Bloomberg N.Y. State Vote Could Raise Pressure on Officials Over Hasidic Schools - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Public Libraries Face Thre

I am not even a fan of Fall Out Boy, and yet I am distressed that Atlanta’s Midtown Music Festival, scheduled for September 17-18 in Piedmont Park, was cancelled this week by organizers because of a preemption issue. Well, that is not what Instagram account said , but it is what happened . This time, it is about gun safety. In 2014, then-Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia signed the so-called Safe Carry Protection Act, which expanded where people could carry concealed firearms

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

Minneapolis ordered to cease implementation of 2040 plan - StarTribune.com New map highlights home deeds with racist language in Ramsey County | MPR News Florida Abortion Ban Violates Jews' Religious Freedom, Lawsuit Says | U.S. News® | US News Abortion protections in New York fortified ahead of SCOTUS ruling - POLITICO New Jersey aims to lure Georgia firms by warning of ‘dangerous’ anti-abortion policies (ajc.com) Rural America Reels From Violent Crime. ‘People Lost The

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

Welcome to the second installment of Swan's Picks! Catch up on some state and local news before the weekend arrives. The Florida House has passed a 15 week abortion ban …and Florida may also pass “the preemption bill to end all preemption bills” Since the mountain lions cannot, California NIMBYs consider whether direct democracy and “the mother of all NIMBY initiatives” can let them escape from state zoning laws …and they figure out a way to crush the dreams of thousands of

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

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

Judge Sutton’s Who Decides? is a gracefully written, good-natured, and open-minded book about the acceptance of pluralism in governmental processes. The book covers a broad swathe of questions concerning institutional design — legislative districts, agency powers, plural executives, selection of judges, local governments’ autonomy, among other topics. Uniting these disparate topics is the gently implicit argument that designing institutions is difficult, and reasonable peopl

This post is based on a presentation for the 2021 North Carolina Law Review Symposium "Home Rule in the 21st Century" It has been a roller coaster ride for local budgets. 2020 promised another year of record growth until the pandemic created what seemed like a fiscal cliff for many cities. As the year continued, it became clear that many states would weather the pandemic recession far better than initially feared, but local leaders continued to highlight their cities’ budge

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

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

Bob Hagemann is a partner at Poyner Spruill LLC in Raleigh, NC and served in the Charlotte City Attorney's Office for twenty-four years, the last seven as City Attorney. This post is based on his presentation for the 2021 North Carolina Law Review Symposium "Home Rule in the 21st Century" In 2016, the Charlotte City Council considered joining most other major cities in this country in prohibiting discrimination in places of public accommodation based on sexual orientation, ge

Although one might hope that during a global pandemic, governments would be united against the common enemy of a deadly virus, the...