Many of us have been frustrated with local government. Perhaps the roads go unpaved, the streets go unplowed, or traffic tickets are handed out too aggressively. Most of us don’t do much besides be quietly unhappy, although some angrier citizens take their complaints to city hall. An elite few judges, however, have dared strike a mortal blow against local government and attempt to abolish it via judicial decision.
This post covers the surprisingly rich American tradition of “state supreme court decisions ruling that nearly all municipal government is unconstitutional.” There are two such cases that I’m aware of, one in Kansas and one in Ohio—but, as the saying goes, it’s odd that it happened twice.
The underlying problem arose from constitutional law. Both states’ constitutions required that laws about cities be written in a generally applicable way rather than on a case-by-case basis. Both states ignored this provision and wrote city charters on a case-by-case basis anyway. Judges responded by observing that the state constitutions forbade these charters and therefore ruled that nearly all city governments were unlawful.
