Current law makes it easy to sue cities. Too easy. While suing federal and state governments is notoriously difficult, various doctrines open courthouse doors to taxpayers, homeowners, and politically favored groups suing local governments. These doctrines further strengthen powerful actors, weaken cities’ ability to initiate reforms, and undermine local democracy.
This Article illustrates how contracts between local governments—interlocal agreements (ILAs)—play a powerful lawmaking function yet lack democratic accountability. It traces the problem to state statutory schemes, where checks designed to promote transparency are ignored by state officials and courts, enabling undemocratic local power by virtue of state silence.
City subunits may facilitate municipal objectives of service provision and democratic governance. Different types of subunits risk various conflicts with their constituents and the city that hosts them. This Feature analyzes sources of those conflicts and reforms to address them, and argues for city deference to subunits in limited cases.
State-level public utility commissions regulate our energy systems. But they are often viewed as ill-equipped to address climate change. This Feature counters that conventional wisdom by uncovering a forgotten history of New York’s energy transition, revealing that public utility’s potential to facilitate a clean-energy transition is broader than we imagine.
author. Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Law Clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 2006-07.
In June 2007—as my year with Justice O’Connor began drawing to a close—she stopped by my office for a friendly chat late one afternoon. Rather than physically knocking, she playfully intoned the
Many are well-acquainted with Justice Brandeis’s metaphor that states serve as laboratories of democracy. While dicta in the 1932 decision, New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann,1 Brandeis’s words have taken hold in legal scholarship and subsequent jurisprudence for nearly a century since. However, what is often left out
author. Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; Law Clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 2001-02. I thank my law clerks Rianna Hidalgo and Becca Hansen for their helpful edits to drafts of this tribute.
I had the great fortune to clerk for Justice O’Connor in
The glaring gap in tort theory is its failure to take adequate account of liability insurance. We explain how to begin filling the gap in tort theory that results from omitting consideration of liability insurance, showing how liability insurance can appropriately figure in both deontic and consequentialist theories of tort.
Universal vacatur is a legitimate part of administrative law’s remedial scheme, not a judicial invention. This Feature traces universal vacatur from the pre-APA period through Abbott Labs. It also juxtaposes the case against universal vacatur with the new major questions doctrine, showing that both centralize power in the Supreme Court.
Critiqued as a blank check for judicial intervention, the absurdity canon has been all but abandoned by modern textualists. But its total dismissal is unwarranted. By dissecting absurdity’s multiple meanings, this Note reframes and justifies the absurdity canon in terms of constitutional values inherent in the Equal Protection Clause.
In the increasingly globalized modern economy, large corporate actors have long operated with relative impunity for transnational human-rights abuses committed in the name of profit maximization. This Collection explores perspectives from a range of voices engaged in the fight for corporate accountability in both the United States and abroad.
Administrative law faces a critical juncture. Settled doctrines ranging from deference to agency interpretations of statutes to delegations of executive power have been destabilized. And earlier this year, Justice Breyer—himself an administrative-law scholar—retired from the Supreme Court. We publish this Collection as a tribute to his judicial legacy.
As law-school clinics assume a growing role in legal education, instructors, students, and community partners have used clinics to test novel, sometimes radical lawyering approaches. This Collection draws from those experiments, using case studies from family defense, immigration, and worker rights to explore the relationship between law and social movements.