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
