Drafts available by inquiry.

Regulating the Company Town Using corporate location incentive megadeals as a case study, this Article explores how an antimonopoly framework might be applied to mitigate harms facilitated by corporate dominance over local communities. I first demonstrate that the populist movement responsible for the enactment of our early antitrust protections was substantially motivated by broad opposition to the lavish state and local subsidies demanded by private railroad companies during the late 19th century. When Congress later strengthened those protections by creating the FTC in 1914, federal legislators were attempting to address a set of harms that they understood to be created by unregulated interjurisdictional competition for taxable corporate activity. Reviewing recent empirical literature and public reporting, I next show that contemporary location incentive megadeals present legally cognizable categories of antitrust harm: to healthy product market competition, to consumers of private and public goods, to labor market structure, and to processes of local democratic self-governance. Finally, I argue that an antimonopoly approach offers various institutional advantages as compared to previous (unsuccessful) attempts to rein in this source of public resource misallocation—namely by accommodating important policy considerations and overcoming the coordination challenges that have prevented states and local governments from acting on their own.

Odious Constitutions and Democratic Jubilee In international public law, “odious debt” refers to fiscal obligations that have been imposed on a current population without their consent and for the benefit of an authoritarian regime. Under the legal theory, such intergenerational obligations cannot legitimately bind a democratic people: the doctrine provides a mechanism for discharging those debts even where the underlying agreement forecloses the possibility of restructure. This article considers whether certain constitutional structures might also be understood as odious under a parallel doctrinal framework. I conceptualize “odious constitutions” as those that are (by nature of their structure) unrepresentative, unresponsive, and unamendable. I develop this concept through several case studies: the disenfranchising “Redeemer” state constitutions that followed the end of Reconstruction in the American South; the post-1969 Rhodesian constitution that constitutionalized white minority rule during the regime’s short existence; the Myanmar constitution that granted the incumbent military junta an institutional veto over constitutional change; and Pinochet’s 1980 constitution that is now being rewritten by the Chilean people. Engaging with political theory as well as historical experience, I consider the possibility of democratic jubilee from odious constitutions. Applying this new adapted framework, I suggest that sustained popular majorities legitimately retain the right to act directly—as by formally unauthorized plebiscite—to amend odious constitutional provisions that entrench authoritarian politics by preventing democratization. 

Co-Authored

The Effects of ‘Macro-Segregation’ on Local Fiscal Capacity: Developing a Measure of Tax Base Fragmentation (with Robert Manduca and Jacob Waggoner) In the absence of significant centralized fiscal transfers, local fiscal capacity is primarily determined by the base of taxable wealth that is contained within contested municipal boundaries. This institutional arrangement—which has long characterized the United States’ political economy but is unique among wealthy countries—increases the stakes of jurisdictional proliferation as well as economic sorting across geographic space. An emerging literature on “macro-segregation” has found that patterns of racial and economic segregation increasingly is characterized by separation across independent municipalities within the same metropolitan area, rather than across neighborhoods within the same local jurisdiction. But although researchers have observed the resource hoarding dynamics that result from the interactions between residential segregation and jurisdictional fragmentation, to our knowledge none have attempted to quantify the degree to which economic macro-segregation directly affects local fiscal capacity across metropolitan areas of the United States. We introduce a new measure of tax base inequality—the Metropolitan Index of Tax Segmentation (“MITS”)—that captures the share of taxable property wealth that would need to shift across municipalities in a metropolitan area in order for each to have the same per capita tax base. We believe this work has the potential to uncover novel insights into the relationships between wealth inequality, residential segregation, and jurisdictional fragmentation.

Off-Balance: The Structurally Conservative Nature of American Courts (with Maya Sen and Kathy Thelen)