Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: One-Day Take Home
The grade for this course will be determined on the basis of two types of assignment. The first is a semester-long team project in which your team will be responsible for, among other things, reaching out to local community members, attending legislative sessions, and drafting a piece of state or local legislation. The second is a one-day take-home exam that you will take individually.

Consider the problem that you came to law school to solve. Perhaps it was a family member’s involvement with the criminal legal system. Your fear that climate change will endanger humanity’s future. Widening inequalities on the basis of wealth, race, and gender. A feeling that a broken democracy, school system, or immigration system is failing our children.

Whatever the problem, the first drafts of any solutions developed in the United States will likely come not from the federal government and its judiciary, but from state and local governments. Successful state and local programs have inspired successful federal programs like social security, public health insurance, and climate-change legislation. And where the Federal Constitution’s rigid limits on governance have been updated only two dozen times since 1787, state constitutions and local charters are continuously reimagined to provide for effective, active governments with jurisdiction over nearly every aspect of domestic life. Collectively, the multitrillion-dollar budgets of states and local governments rival that of the federal government. Yet few state legislatures are constricted by the concept of enumerated powers; rare is the city gridlocked by the equivalent of a Senate. Instead, states and local governments have far more flexibility to pursue any number of ends—for good and for evil.

This course will introduce you to the enormous range of policies and institutional structures that are possible at the state and local level. It will introduce you to the legal limits that currently bind those institutions as well as strategies for overcoming them. It will also challenge you to reflect upon what principles are served by existing arrangements and how those principles might be better served with changes.