Brian Highsmith (@bhighsmith.bsky.social)

Farbman, "Towns or Counties" Daniel Farbman (Boston College Law) has posted "Towns or Counties." The article appears in Volume 59, no. 3, of the Indiana Law Review. The abstract: The United States is a nation of counties with a latent romance for towns. The development of American local government law from the arrival of the first Europeans was defined by two opposing visions of settlement and local governance. On the one hand was the county, with its roots in the dispersed settlements and plantations of the South. On the other hand, was the town, with its roots in the communitarian congregational theocracies of New England. These models contrasted and competed in the on-the-ground progress of settler colonialism, and they contrasted and competed in the theoretical debates over how Americans should define themselves and the project of a growing continental nation/empire. On the ground, it was the dispersed settlement, protection of property rights, and minimal government of counties that spread and shaped most local government development from first arrival to 1800. But in the eyes of elites, political theorists, and the founders of the 1780s, the orderly and collective idea of the town remained a figure of political imagination and aspiration. This idealism was written into the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This Article tells the history of these competing modes of settlement and imagination and how they have shaped local government law in the United States from the colonial project and into the imperial project of westward expansion. In so doing, it describes and unsettles the shape of our present local government law. Everyone who lives in the United States lives within the boundaries of at least one local government. Almost all of us live within a county boundary, and many of us live within a separate municipal boundary—in a town or a city. The structure of these governments and the differences between them not only shape the legal landscape of the most sprawling and diverse area of American public law (local government law); they also shape residents’ lived experiences and civic imaginations. It matters where people live and how they are governed there. Because it matters, the formation and adjustment of local government systems and their boundaries have been subjects of contestation, theorizing, and political imagination from the beginning of the colonization of North America. Not only has that contestation shaped the world we live in today, but it shapes the ongoing process of local government change, development, and administration. The full article is available here. -- Karen Tani http://dlvr.it/TT2kMk