Law Commons^™

Principles Of Home Rule For The Twenty-First Century, Richard Briffault, Nestor M. Davidson, Paul A. Diller, Sarah Fox, Laurie Reynolds, Erin A. Scharff, Richard Schragger, Rick Su

Faculty Scholarship

The National League of Cities’ “Principles of Home Rule for the Twenty-First Century” updates the American Municipal Association’s 1953 “Model Constitutional Provisions for Municipal Home Rule.” The AMA approach was widely adopted, but those provisions are now over 65 years old and intervening social, demographic, economic, and political changes necessitates a new approach to the legal structure of state-local relations. The NLC’s approach is organized around four basic principles, which are cashed-out in a model constitutional home rule provision, with commentary. The first principle states that a state’s law of home rule should provide local governments the full capacity to …