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A key question in the academic and policy debates over the optimal architecture for sovereign debt has long been whether sovereigns should be given access to bankruptcy or its contractual equivalent. One side of the debate cries moral hazard, saying that the cost of government borrowing will rise if governments have the option to access bankruptcy. Proponents of the other side see bankruptcy as a means to solve a coordination problem and reduce the cost of government borrowing. Using data on disclosures made by issuers of municipal bonds in the United States, this Article attempts to measure the extent to which investors care about access to bankruptcy as an indicator of the level of risk they face in lending. These findings suggest that investors care a lot less than academics and policy makers do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land use regulation and zoning have long been core functions of local governments. Critics of local land use practices, however, assert that local regulations are too restrictive and that "exclusionary zoning" ordinances increase housing costs, reduce mobility, entrench racial segregation, prevent the poor from accessing jobs and services, and reduce economic productivity. Spurred in large part by an affordable housing crisis in popular metropolitan areas, the YIMBY ("Yes in My Backyard") movement has urged state and even federal action to override local land use regulations that raise barriers to the construction of market-rate housing. The conventional wisdom is that local governments cannot be trusted with land use policymaking and that striking down local regulatory barriers is necessary to address a whole range of ills. This Article challenges that conventional wisdom. It does not contest the chief harms of exclusionary zoning, which have been recognized since the inception of Euclidean zoning in the 1920s. Instead, the Article argues that for those who share the goal of creating more equitable metropolitan regions, the rush to preempt local land use regulations and adopt market-favoring statewide reforms is a mistake. The history of centralized intervention in local land use suggests that preemptive state laws will more likely injure lower-income persons than help them. Indeed, states generally prevent local governments from adopting affordable housing policies. So too, deregulating the housing market can lead to higher costs and less control over development and displacement, often to the detriment of lower-income and minority communities. Though the "market" solution to housing affordability assumes that economic growth lifts all boats, the gains of growth tend to run to skilled labor and the already prosperous. Finally, the logic of land use preemption undermines cities' other efforts to address economic inequality. Advocates for redistributive social welfare policies favor expanding city power, not limiting it. That is because urbanbased economic justice efforts are regularly blocked by hostile state legislatures. Local land use exclusion can have pernicious effects. But preemptive state laws that further reduce or eliminate city power are not an answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article uses controversies over government-sponsored religious symbols and Confederate monuments to consider the appropriate constitutional limits on the government's symbolic expression. It contrasts two types of constitutional harm that can arise from the government's expressive acts. "Expressions that harm" refers to denigrating or exclusionary government speech that causes material harm to members of the community. "Expressive wrongs" describes constitutional violations that arise when a government action conveys an improper social meaning. The government's symbolic speech can and should be subject to constitutional review under either theory. The Supreme Court has been increasingly hesitant to impose substantive constraints on the government's speech, however. Recently, the Court decided American Legion v. American Humanist Association, holding that a 40-foot-tall Latin cross in Bladensburg, Maryland, does not violate the Establishment Clause. It further held that long-standing government-sponsored religious symbols enjoy a presumption of constitutionality. This Article critiques American Legion and asks what it portends for potential equal protection challenges to Confederate iconography. It argues that even as the Court is hesitant to impose substantive restrictions on the government's symbolic speech, the Court should be attentive to the dangers of majoritarian control of the public square. The Article describes three such dangers: entrenchment, favoritism, and domination. Government symbolic speech that is a product of, or results in, the entrenchment of permanent symbolic majorities, that favors some private speakers over others, or that is imposed by one political community on another, should be constitutionally troubling. The Article applies these minimal conditions for legitimate government speech to current debates about religious symbols and Confederate monuments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States has long been an urban country, but it is fast becoming a metropolitan one. Population and economic activity are now concentrated in cities and their surrounding regions. The largest twenty of these city-regions account for almost fifty-two percent of total U.S. GDP. This "metropolitan revolution" represents a fundamental challenge to our current federalism. The old federalism assumed that capital and labor are fully mobile and that subnational governments-- in this case, states--will engage in competitive efforts to attract desirable investment while the federal government will assume the bulk of redistributive spending. The new federalism rejects the notion that economic growth can be attributed to interstate competition or that only central governments can effectively engage in social welfare redistribution. As economic activity becomes concentrated in cities, those cities become capable of engaging in forms of regulation and redistribution that the standard model of fiscal federalism had deemed impossible. Our current state-based federalism, however, fails to appropriately align capabilities with responsibilities. Instead of empowering cities, states are increasingly seeking to defund, defang, and delegitimize them. The mismatch between the prevailing sites of productive economic activity and the location of regulation and redistribution has subverted the values conventionally associated with federalism. State power is being deployed to undermine accountability, limit experimentation, and prevent the effective exercise of local selfgovernment. One current consequence of the gap between state and city power is increased political polarization. A future consequence may be an institutional restructuring that better reflects the new geography of production and population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American cities are under attack. The last few years have witnessed an explosion of preemptive legislation challenging and overriding municipal ordinances across a wide range of policy areas. State-city conflicts over the municipal minimum wage, LGBTantidiscrimination, and sanctuary city laws have garnered the most attention, but these conflicts are representative of a larger trend toward state aggrandizement. These legal challenges to municipal regulation have been accompanied by an increasingly shrill anticity politics, emanating from both state and federal officials. This Article describes this politics by way of assessing the nature of-and reasons for- the hostility to city lawmaking. It argues that anti-urbanism is a longstanding and enduring feature of American federalism and seeks to understand how a constitutional system overtly dedicated to the principles of devolution can be so hostile to the exercise of municipal power. The Article also provides a current accounting of state preemptive legislation and assesses the cities' potential legal and political defenses. It concludes that, without a significant rethinking of state-based federalism, the American city is likely to remain vulnerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the current states of political economy of city power and discusses the efforts taken to reform the same in the U.S. Topics discussed include practice of treating cities as competitors in a global marketplace for capital and labor; efforts taken by the U.S. Government to address the weaknesses through institutional reforms such as home rule, national urban policy, and regionalism; and Milliken v. Bradley court case on same.

An essay is presented on political economy policies which attracts mobile taxpayers for development of city. It highlights the structural political barriers that need to be overcome in order to generate progressive policies which provide leverage for a revived urban liberalism. It addresses importance of Interlocal tax-base competition that encourage pro-market policies, social welfarist for pro-growth political coalitions that capture resources for developers.

An essay is presented on the core elements of sovereignty, specialness, and singularity which comprise the freedom of the church (FOTC) principle as of 2013, focusing on a reported translation dilemma between eleventh-century and twenty-first-century Catholic thought. The pluralism and fragmentation of religion in modern democratic states are addressed, along with FOTC justifications based on traditional theological grounds and in secular terms. A separation of church and state is examined.

The article discusses the issue on whether citizens or bondholders are the bearers of the risk of municipal default. The author tackles the question of municipal monitoring, arguing that bondholders are the appropriate bearers and not the citizens. He also suggests reasons unrelated to creditor or citizen monitoring for why local governments generally do not fault.

Recent state and municipal budget crises have generated a great deal of consternation among market participants and policymakers; they have also led scholars to debate the merits of bailouts or other forms of debt relief. This Essay considers why the mechanisms that were supposed to control state and local fiscal behavior ex ante have not worked. In the aftermath of the state and municipal debt crises of the nineteenth century, states adopted a series of constitutional reforms intended to constrain state and local fiscal behavior. In addition, the debt markets and the Tieboutian market in jurisdictions should theoretically prevent states and municipalities from overspending. Neither the fiscal constitution in the states nor the markets have prevented state and local fiscal difficulties, however; indeed, they have arguably contributed to those difficulties. Nevertheless, much of the current debate over bailouts and state bankruptcy reprises the longstanding skepticism of ordinary state and local political processes. This Essay argues that this distrust of local democratic decisionmaking is unwarranted, that efforts to constrain fiscal politics are destined to fail, and that the solution to state and local fiscal crises is largely a matter of politics and not a matter of institutional design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the heated legal political and scholarly battles that rage around the Court's Establishment Clause decisions, this Article contends that these decisions are actually quite tangential to the maintenance of the nonestablishment norm. The Article argues, first, that a pervasive feature of modern Establishment Clause jurisprudence is that the Court's stated doctrine is underenforced; second, that there are some legitimate reasons for that underenforcement; and, third, that the Court's decisions serve mostly as political markers that leave much pertinent activity wholly unregulated by law. By focusing not on what the Court is doing but on what it concertedly seeks not to do, the Article hopes to illuminate the relationship between law and politics in an era in which religious-political movements have become increasingly sophisticated. In light of these movements, the important question for scholars of the Establishment Clause is how the Court "manages establishment" in the political/legal culture outside constitutional law. The Article assesses four potential answers to this question and discusses a number of recent Establishment Clause decisions, paying special attention to disputes about the Ten Commandments, the Pledge of Allegiance, and faith-based initiatives. The Article concludes by suggesting how a self-conscious Supreme Court Justice might help maintain the constitutional settlement of nonestablishment despite the Court's limited doctrinal influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant intellectual and financial resources have been committed to decentralization projects in the developing world based on the idea that federal constitutional systems and local government autonomy will encourage economic growth. These efforts have been premised in part on scholars' claims that the federalism of nineteenth and early twentieth century America generated the nation's enormous economic growth. This Article challenges the claim that political decentralization promotes economic development in two ways. First, by looking closely at the legal history of local autonomy in the United States, it shows that the shifting legal status of cities vis-à-vis their states—which has resulted in alternative bouts of centralization and decentralization—did not cause economic growth. If anything, shifts in the degree of formal local power can be better understood as a consequence of economic growth. Second, it invokes newer work in economic geography that suggests that economic development is unavoidably uneven across jurisdictions and that the reason some places do well economically and others do poorly may have more to do with luck or path dependency than with particular legal institutions. For lawyers the stakes are high for we are told that law and legal frameworks—like the vertical division of authority—can make a great deal of difference to economic welfare. But this understanding of law does not take into account the spatial reality of economic development or the circular relationship between economic growth and legal change. This does not mean that the vertical distribution of powers does not matter—it does, but not in the ways that the decentralization-growth thesis presumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of urban law and policy tend to assume that local officials can exert some influence over city well-being. More specifically, the literature assumes that government policies - either at the federal, state, or local level- can influence local economic growth and decline, the most important determinants of a city's health. This connection between policy and local economic outcomes implies a theory of how cities form and grow, however, and legal scholars have not adequately articulated such a theory. This Article argues that we need a better (and more self-conscious) account of city formation and local economic growth The Article then tests our intuitions about the relationship between policy and economic development by considering a number of explanations for why cities have resurged over the last fifteen to twenty years. Finally, the Article contrasts two economic development policies that have been adopted in New York City-one that preceded the recent financial crisis and one that followed it. The Article concludes that we do not know enough to be able to predict how one policy or another will affect city growth and decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article examines local efforts to regulate mobile capital. Despite the conventional wisdom that subnational governments cannot effectively control or redistribute capital, cities have increasingly sought to do just that. This Article describes these efforts, which include putting conditions on the entry of development dollars through contract, excluding capital through anti-chain and anti-big box store laws, and redistributing from capital to labor through local minimum wage laws and other labor-friendly legislation. The Article describes the economic and political factors that have given riseto these local regulatory efforts and assesses the viability of local regulation of mobile capital. In the course of doing so, I argue that the mobility of capital drives a set of local political pathologies, all of which revolve around the governmental promotion of, participation in, and subsidization of private commercial enterprise. Geographically fixed cities are inclined both to give too much away in trying to tract mobile capital and to extract too much from capital once it has become fixed in place. These two political problems — giveaways and exploitation — explain the historical development of local government law as well as current approaches to the division of labor among city, state, and federal levels of government. The new "regulatory localism" challenges the proposition that industrial policy, redistribution, and other responses to global economic restructuring must be addressed at the national level. It also challenges the proposition that local economic development policies must necessarily be biased in favor of corporate capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of cities and local government generally has gone un-examined by legal scholars of the constitutional common market. Yet in a highly urbanized country in which cities and large metropolitan areas dominate the national economy, much of the cross-border movement of persons, goods, and capital inside the United States is more accurately characterized as intermunicipal rather than interstate. This Article examines the constitutional rules that govern this cross-border movement from the perspective of the city. The Article argues that judges and commentators have misapprehended the jurisprudence of the American common market because they have been looking at its operation on the wrong scale. Examining how the doctrine operates at the municipal level exposes the gaps and contradictions in the jurisprudence, reveals connections between legal doctrines that heretofore had not been considered part of the free trade regime, and highlights the Supreme Court's implicit (and undertheorized) urban economic policy. The reframing of the economic and jurisprudential place of cities in the free trade constitution sheds light on a number of important recent cases, in particular Kelo v. City of New London, in which the Court upheld a city's use of eminent domain for economic development purposes under the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause. The Article's city-centric approach also intervenes in a number of judicial and scholarly debates, including the appropriate reach and application of the "dormant" commerce clause, the appropriate judicial oversight of local land use regulations under the Takings Clause, and the role of courts in policing and shaping local economic development efforts more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historic weakness of the American mayoralty and some reform efforts designed to strengthen it. It is inferred that the weakness of mayoralty has two grounds, including the lack of power and a federal system that depreciates city power. These have negative consequences like the reinforcement of the parochialism of its leaders, and in turn, the city's subordinate status. The author argues that the strong post is a probable tool for democratic self-government.

Much of the Supreme Court's modern Religion Clause doctrine has been forged in conflicts that directly implicate the traditional powers of local governments: primary and secondary education, land use, police powers. Constitutional theorists have rarely treated this jurisdictional fact as significant because the post-incorporation Court has never made a distinction among levels of government when considering Establishment or Free Exercise Clause challenges. This Article argues that courts and commentators should make such a distinction. It claims that local regulations that burden or benefit religious belief, conduct, or exercise have different institutional effects than do similar slate or national regulations and that these differential effects should be taken into account when determining the contours of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses. More specifically, this Article contends that local government -- and more generally the decentralization of power -- is a robust structural component of religious liberty. The Article questions the conventional wisdom, usually derived from Madison's Federalist 10, that small-scale polities are likely to be hostile to the rights of religious minorities and therefore particularly in need of central oversight. It asserts, instead, that the chief threat to religious liberty is the exercise of centralized power generally, either to benefit religion as a class or to burden it. The Court's Religion Clause jurisprudence should therefore be more skeptical of federal statutes and regulations that touch on religion than similar local statutes and regulations. On this argument, local governments are appropriate sites -- not the only sites, certainly, but central and overlooked sites -- for the negotiation of church-state relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposes the definition of local autonomy based on the rhetoric of community. Significance of the United States Supreme Court ruling on the case of Chicago, Illinois versus Morales; Definition of local autonomy based on the rhetoric of community placed in the context of two streams of legal thought; Details of language games played by autonomous communities characterizing arguments urging deference to local norms.