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Introduction 658 I. The Challenge of Determining Bankruptcy Eligibility 665 II. Data and Findings 672 A. Access to Bankruptcy 674 B. Payment Terms 677 C. Non-Payment Terms 678 D. Governing [...], 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.

INTRODUCTION In 2020, the National League of Cities ("NLC") published the Principles of Home Rule for the 21st Century ("Principles"), (1) a groundbreaking new vision of local-government legal authority to [...], This Article explains and defends the National League of Cities' Principles of Home Rule for the 21st Century, which the authors participated in drafting. The Principles project both articulates a vision of state-local relations appropriate to an urban age and, as with previous efforts stretching back to the Progressive Era, includes a model constitutional home rule article designed to serve as the foundation for state-level constitutional law reform. This Article explains the origins of the Principles, outlines the major components of its model constitutional provision, and defends the model against a set of criticisms common to this and past home-rule reform efforts. Necessitated by the increasingly hostile relationship between cities and their states, the Principles would reset the state-local relationship to better align local legal authority with the actual role that local governments play in contemporary governance. Currently, cities do not have sufficient authority to address the basic problems of urban governance, and the global pandemic has illustrated the widening gap between cities and their states over even the most basic public health and safety issues. Cities are seeking to address these and other constituent concerns but are regularly stymied by state law that is often aggressively deployed to punish local officials and limit their democratic responsiveness. A reformed home rule is an essential aspect of the states' "internal federalism" and is crucial to addressing the challenges of twenty-first century governance. Introduction 1386 I. The Structural Problem of Local Authority and the NLC's Structural Response 1390 A. Weaknesses of the Current Legal Regime 1391 B. A New Partnership Model of Local Authority 1396 II. Policy and the Principles 1400 A. Housing Affordability 1401 B. Corporate Subsidies, Pension Crises, Local Elections, and Police Misconduct 1406 1. Corporate Subsidies and the Pension Crisis 1406 2. Local Elections 1409 3. Police Reform 1411 III. Ideology and Home Rule 1413 Conclusion 1418

INTRODUCTION 126 I. THE REDISCOVERY OF EXCLUSIONARY ZONING 134 A. What is Exclusionary Zoning? 134 B. What Explains the Rediscovery of Exclusionary Zoning? 141 II. THE LIMITS OF CENTRALIZATION 149 [...], 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 urban-based 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.

Introduction 91 I. Weak Cities 96 A. Market-Based Local Government 96 B. State-Based Federalism 98 II. Efforts to Enhance City Power 102 A. Home Rule 101 B. National Urban Policy [...]

Observers of metropolitan dysfunction have long advocated for a regional tier of government that could (among other things) equalize spending across local jurisdictions, pursue cooperative economic development policies, provide for fair share housing, rationalize land use, and coordinate transportation planning. For many good government reformers, right-scaling our fragmented metropolitan areas appears to be an obvious solution to interjurisdictional spillovers and competitive races-to-the-bottom. This article counsels caution. "Region hope"—the idea that the substantive problems of metropolitan governance can be solved regionally by redrawing territorial boundaries to encompass ever-larger areas—is perennial. But territorial manipulation in aid of state centralization has significant drawbacks. The regional impulse exhibits some key features of failed social engineering efforts; seen through the lens of the state, these efforts privilege technocratic over democratic governance, bureaucratic over local knowledge, and mobile over immobile capital. That does not mean that regionalism should be resisted in all cases, but only that the costs of territorial manipulation should be weighed against its asserted benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction I. Monitoring and Risk Bearing II. Preventing Local Fiscal Distress III. Why the Preference for Bondholders? Conclusion INTRODUCTION I own municipal bonds: Lowell, Massachusetts general obligation bonds; New York [...]

THE HOMEVOTER HYPOTHESIS: HOW HOME VALUES INFLUENCE LOCAL GOVERNMENT TAXATION, SCHOOL FINANCE, AND LAND USE POLICIES. By William A. Fischel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 329. $45. In [...]

The article examines state-city conflicts and how they reflect urban-rural polarization. It explores the features of state democratic practice, namely state legislative capture, anti-urban bias and metropolitanism. Topics discussed include the contribution of these features to intrastate and national polarization, and the mechanisms to address the urban-rural divide.

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]

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]

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.

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]