State and Local Government Law Commons^™

Interlocal Power Roulette, Daniel B. Rosenbaum

Indiana Law Journal

Local governments inhabit a crowded ecosystem. Cities, counties, and school districts—and many more—share overlapping territorial jurisdictions. Overlapping jurisdiction goes hand-in-hand with redundant local power, defined as a scenario where multiple governments hold independent authority to take the exact same action in the exact same territorial space. In Maine, for example, state law empowers three local bodies to operate the same sewer infrastructure. In Detroit, two separate entities are equally tasked with managing the city’s streetlights. And in communities across the country, local governments are broadly authorized to own the same parcels of public land, including in Oakland, California, where public …

Research On Renewable Energy Project Opposition Selected For Environmental Law And Policy Annual Review Award, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

A publication co-authored by Indiana University Maurer School of Law Dean Christiana Ochoa and 2021 Law School alumna Kacey Cook has been selected to appear in the 17th edition of the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review.

“Deals in the Heartland: Renewable Energy Projects, Local Resistance, and How Law Can Help” was authored by Ochoa, Cook, and University of Minnesota Law School third-year student Hanna Weil and was published in January 2023 in the Minnesota Law Review.

A Newfound Power: How The Ohio Supreme Court Should Approach The Next Partisan Gerrymander, Bradley Davis

Indiana Law Journal

Partisan gerrymandering is a practice as old as the nation itself and a problem both state and federal courts continue to struggle with. In 2015, the people of Ohio overwhelmingly voted to amend the state constitution to prevent overly partisan outcomes in state legislative redistricting. Following the 2021 redistricting cycle, the Ohio Supreme Court narrowly struck down several redistricting proposals in what devolved into a protracted fight with legislators and executive officials. This Note carefully lays out the development of redistricting jurisprudence, Ohio’s relevant constitutional provisions, and various state and federal judicial approaches to alleged gerrymanders. Using a combination of …

Enforcing Interstate Compacts In Federal Systems, Michael Osborn

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

The central goal of a federal system is for local government units to retain degrees of independence, specifically over matters of importance to that local unit. A logical corollary to that independence is the ability for local units to negotiate and contract with other local units on matters of importance. Therefore, it is not surprising that almost every federal system allows, either implicitly or explicitly, member states to form binding compacts with other states, the union government, or municipalities.1 Some federal democracies even allow member states to compact with foreign governments. Furthermore, almost every federal constitution includes a provision outlining …

Maurer School Of Law To Host Court Of Appeals Argument, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

No abstract provided.

Enforcing Outbound Forum Selection Clauses In State Court, John Coyle, Katherine Robinson

Indiana Law Journal

Forum selection clauses are a staple of modern business law. Parties agree, ex ante, on where they can sue one another and then rely on the courts to enforce these agreements. Although the number of contracts containing forum selection clauses has skyrocketed in recent years, there is a dearth of empirical information about enforcement practice at the state level. Are there any states that refuse to enforce them? How frequently are they enforced? Under what circumstances, if any, will these clauses be deemed unenforceable? The existing literature provides few answers to these questions.

This Article aims to fill that gap. …

The Settlement Trap, Lindsey Simon

Indiana Law Journal

Mass tort victims often wait years for resolution of their personal injury claims, but many who successfully navigate this arduous process will not receive a single dollar of their settlement award. According to applicable bankruptcy and state law, settlement payments may be an asset of the estate that the trustee, exercising its significant authority, administers and distributes to creditors instead of a claimant who had filed for bankruptcy. This distribution power maximizes repayment, a critical counterbalance to the robust protections and benefits that debtors receive in bankruptcy.

Setting aside the perceived unfairness of taking desperately needed money from tort victims, …

Indiana Practice Materials: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, Susan Demaine, John Moreland, Emma Kearney

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

State Practice Materials: Annotated Bibliographies is intended to provide legal information professionals and legal practitioners timely and relevant state-specific information about the legal sources available to conduct effective legal research in any given state.

DeMaine, Moreland, and Kearney co-authored the chapter on Indiana materials.

The Zoning Straitjacket: The Freezing Of American Neighborhoods Of Single-Family Houses, Robert Ellickson

Indiana Law Journal

Municipal zoning practices profoundly shape urban life in the United States. In regions such as Silicon Valley, regulatory barriers to residential construction have helped raise house prices to roughly ten times the national median. These astronomic prices have prompted some households to move to places, such as Texas, where housing is far cheaper. I have been engaged in an empirical study of zoning practices in Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater Austin. This Article presents one of my central findings, induced from those metropolitan areas and elsewhere: local zoning politics typically freezes land uses in an established neighborhood of …

Tort Immunity In The Pandemic, Betsy J. Grey, Samantha Orwoll

Indiana Law Journal

The Covid-19 pandemic set off a public health emergency that quickly brought doctors and other health care providers to the front line, while shuttering businesses throughout the United States. In response to the emergency, the federal and state governments rapidly created broad protections from tort liability for health care providers. To encourage businesses to reopen, some states have also provided liability protection for businesses from personal injury suits brought by patrons and employees. Congress is considering similar protections for businesses as it contemplates further aid packages. Some industries, like nursing homes and universities, are lobbying for specific immunity. This Essay …

Appraising Policy: A Taxonomy Of Ex Ante Impact Assessments, Aaron Hurd

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

In the pursuit of better policy, many nations have turned to Impact Assessments as a potential solution. However, in order to make Impact Assessments as effective and impactful as possible, governments must think critically about which body should write Impact Assessments and what should go into these documents. In this Paper, I survey different Impact Assessment structures and the various government bodies formed to draft or review them. After completing this survey, I conclude that presidential and parliamentary systems should form their Impact Assessment offices differently in order to complement their differing governmental structures. While presidential systems would be best …

Battle Of The Sexes: A History Of Social Change And A Solution For Maintaining A Child’S Best Interest In Light Of The #Metoo Movement, Jackie Calvert

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

Commencement Calls For Review Of Annual Milestones, Austen L. Parrish

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

This weekend is a time of celebration in Bloomington, as we welcome friends and family of the Class of 2019 for our annual commencement ceremony. It’s an important milestone in our students’ lives. Commencement is also a time for looking back. The past year saw several significant milestones for the IU Maurer School of Law. I’d like to touch on just a few of them in this month’s column.

Reds Among The Cream And Crimson, Kelly Kish

Historic Documents

What happened when three IU law professors were accused of harboring Communist sympathies in 1946.

Originally published in the publication 200 The Bicentennial Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 1, January 2019.

Taxonomy Of Minority Governments, Lisa La Fornara

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

A minority government in its most basic form is a government in which the party holding the most parliamentary seats still has fewer than half the seats in parliament and therefore cannot pass legislation or advance policy without support from unaffiliated parties. Because seats in minority parliaments are more evenly distributed amongst multiple parties, opposition parties have greater opportunity to block legislation. A minority government must therefore negotiate with external parties and adjust its policies to garner the majority of votes required to advance its initiatives.

This paper serves as a taxonomy of minority governments in recent history and proceeds …

Understanding The Complicated Landscape Of Civil War Monuments, Jessica Owley, Jess Phelps

Indiana Law Journal

This essay examines the controversy regarding confederate monuments and attempts to contextualize this debate within the current preservation framework. While much attention has been paid to this topic over the past year, particularly with regard to “public” monuments, such discussion has generally failed to recognize the varied and complicated property law layers involved—which can fundamentally change the legal requirements for modification or removal. We propose a spectrum or framework for assessing these resources ranging from public to private, and we explore the messy space in-between these poles where most monuments actually fall. By highlighting these categories, we provide an initial …

Regulating Fantasy Sports: A Practical Guide To State Gambling Laws, And A Proposed Framework For Future State Legislation, Marc Edelman

Indiana Law Journal

In recent months, the legal status of fantasy sports has undergone intense scrutiny, with the attorneys general of many states contending that certain formats of daily fantasy sports violate state gambling laws. In an effort to save the burgeoning daily fantasy sports industry, legislators in these states have proposed bills to affirmatively legalize and regulate daily fantasy sports. However, these bills often fail to adequately address the underlying consumer protection concerns pertaining to the industry.

This Article analyzes how U.S. states currently regulate the fantasy sports marketplace and proposes a framework for future state laws to effectively regulate both traditional …

Domicile Dismantled, Kerry Abrams, Kathryn Barber

Indiana Law Journal

Part I of this Article discusses the legal and factual background of Mas v. Perry. This narrative reveals how the case reflects both the changes in American society that were beginning to occur at that time and the struggle of the concept of domicile to keep pace with those changes. Part II traces the development of the fundamental shift in gender roles that began several years before Mas was decided. This section argues that the growing number of women attending college, embarking upon careers, and forming two-career marriages increased the difficulty of measuring domicile, while undermining the efficacy of a …

One Person, One Vote: Gerrymandering And The Independent Commission, A Global Perspective, James Ruley

Indiana Law Journal

In 1863, on the hallowed fields at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln encapsulated a core principle of democracy by describing our system as a “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” This definition accurately depicts the ideal of democracy—that supreme power is vested in the citizenry, not in the government itself. Since the American model is based on representative democracy instead of direct democracy, extreme scrutiny must be placed upon the system of choosing representatives if government is to accurately represent the will of the people.

One of the greatest abuses of a citizen’s voting rights is gerrymandering. …

A Taxonomy Of Independent Electoral Reapportionment Systems, James Ruley

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

This paper addresses a means of checking legislative gerrymandering, which I have called the Independent Electoral Reapportionment Commission (IERC). Its purpose is to prevent self-interested politicians from drawing biased constituency lines. While scholars have researched gerrymandering, few scholars have researched commissions designed to limit such gerrymandering, and no comprehensive work details the global means of accomplishing this goal.

Thus, the purpose of this paper is not to normatively prescribe the best practices for composing and empowering an IERC, but rather to descriptively show how different countries conduct this process. While Part II makes some determinations about which commissions may conceptually …

Absolute Conflicts Of Law, Anthony J. Colangelo

Indiana Law Journal

This Article coins the term “absolute conflicts of law” to describe situations of overlapping laws from different states that contain simultaneous contradictory commands. It argues that absolute conflicts are a unique legal phenomenon in need of a unique doctrine. The Article extensively explores what absolute conflicts are; how they qualitatively differ from other doctrines like true conflicts of law, act of state, and comity; and classifies absolute conflicts’ myriad doctrinal manifestations through a taxonomy that categorizes absolute conflicts as procedural, substantive, mixed, horizontal, and vertical.

The Article then proposes solutions to absolute conflicts that center on the rule of law …

North Carolina State Board Of Dental Examiners V. Ftc: Aligning Antitrust Law With Commerce Clause Jurisprudence Through A Natural Shift Of State-Federal Balance Of Power, Marie Forney

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s holding in North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC (NC Dental)1 in February 2015 demonstrates a natural shift in the balance of power from the states to the national government. As the country’s interstate and international economy has become more integrated, federal authority has likewise expanded.2 And although the federalism dichotomy has undergone periodic back-and-forth “swings” since the nation’s founding, the end result has been a net increase in federal power. NC Dental exemplifies this trend toward increasing national au-thority through the organic development of interstate commerce.

Abortion, Informed Consent, And Regulatory Spillover, Katherine A. Shaw, Alex Stein

Indiana Law Journal

The constitutional law of abortion stands on the untenable assumption that any state’s abortion regulations impact citizens of that state alone. On this understand-ing, the state’s boundaries demarcate the terrain on which women’s right to abortion clashes with state power to regulate that right.

This Article uncovers a previously unnoticed horizontal dimension of abortion regulation: the medical-malpractice penalties imposed upon doctors for failing to inform patients about abortion risks; the states’ power to define those risks, along with doctors’ informed-consent obligations and penalties; and, critically, the possi-bility that such standards might cross state lines. Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other …

The Double-Edged Sword Of Health Care Integration: Consolidation And Cost Control, Erin C. Fuse Brown, Jaime S. King

Indiana Law Journal

The average family of four in the United States spends $25,826 per year on health care. American health care costs so much because we both overuse and overpay for health care goods and services. The Affordable Care Act’s cost control policies focus on curbing overutilization by encouraging health care providers to integrate to pro-mote efficiency and eliminate waste, but the cost control policies largely ignore prices. This article examines this overlooked half of health care cost control policy: rising prices and the policy levers held by the states to address them. We challenge the conventional wisdom that reducing overutilization through …

Living With Owning, Matt Ampleman, Douglas A. Kysar

Indiana Law Journal

In October, 2011, Terry Thompson committed suicide by gunshot after cutting open the cages of fifty-six exotic animals on his farm in Zanesville, Ohio. Fearing for pub-lic safety, law enforcement officers systematically hunted down the escaped animals in an episode that garnered international attention and prompted renewed discus-sion of the propriety of exotic animal ownership. This Article retells and discusses the circumstances surrounding Terry Thompson’s unhinging, applying frameworks of legal theory, chiefly in the realm of property law, to assess the fabric that held Thompson’s delicate system together and the tensions that led to its unravelling. As an autopsy, the …

Zoning As Taxidermy: Neighborhood Conservation Districts And The Regulation Of Aesthetics, Anika S. Lemar

Indiana Law Journal

Over the last thirty years, municipalities across the country have embraced neighborhood conservation districts, regulations that impose design standards at the neighborhood level. Despite their adoption in thirty-five states, in municipalities from Boise to Cambridge, neighborhood conservation districts have evaded critical analysis by legal scholars. By regulating features such as architectural style, roof angle, and maximum eave overhang, conservation districts purport to protect “neighborhood character” or “cultural stability.” Implicit in these regulations is the unsupported assumption that the essential feature of a neighborhood’s character is its architectural design at a single point in time. The unfortunate result is zoning as …

Erie And Preemption: Killing One Bird With Two Stones, Jeffrey Rensberger

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court has developed a standard account of the Erie doctrine. The Court has directed different analyses of Erie cases depending upon whether the federal law in question is in the form of a federal rule (or statute) or is instead a judge-made law. But the cases applying the doctrine are difficult to explain using the standard account. Although the Court and commentators have noted that Erie is a type of preemption, they provide little, if any, rigorous analysis of Erie in light of preemption doctrines. This Article attempts to fill that void, offering an extended analysis of Erie …

I Did My Time: The Transformation Of Indiana’S Expungement Law, Joseph C. Dugan

Indiana Law Journal

This Note evaluates the transformation of Indiana’s expungement law. Part I addresses the socioeconomic impacts of a criminal record. Part II presents normative arguments both for and against expungement, concluding that the balance tips in favor of forgiveness. Parts III–IV discuss Indiana’s original expungement provisions, the 2013 statute, and the 2014 amendments. Part V explores the reaction to the new law. Finally, Part VI offers recommendations to improve the statute so that its second-chance promise is equitable, accessible, and robust.

The New State Sovereignty Movement, Austin L. Raynor

Indiana Law Journal

In the past decade, states across the country have enacted a flood of legislation to resist perceived federal encroachments on their sovereignty. These opposition statutes assume a variety of forms: some, for instance, merely prohibit state officers from assisting in the enforcement of federal law, while others purport to nullify particular federal regulations. In the fields of controlled substances, immigration, and healthcare, among others, state acts of protest have stimulated the national debate and influenced legal obligations in important ways.

This Article provides the first comprehensive overview of this nascent state sovereignty movement. It categorizes opposition enactments according to the …

Are Indiana’S Newly Expunged Convictions Still Available For Impeachment?, Graham Polando

Indiana Law Journal

During trial, a litigant can, of course, impeach a witness with certain criminal convictions. However, Indiana Evidence Rule 609(c), like its federal counterpart, prohibits parties from introducing such evidence when “the conviction has been the subject of a pardon, annulment, certificate of rehabilitation, or other equivalent procedure based on a finding that the person has been rehabilitated . . . .” Indiana, however, has no procedure for annulment or certificates of rehabilitation—and, until recently, had nothing resembling one.

To some fanfare, the General Assembly has recently enacted an expungement provision. As courts begin to grant these expungements, it is only …