Legal Resources

In a new paper from A Better Balance, Local Solutions Support Center, and Equality Federation, we trace the local roots of LGBTQ+ equality in the United States and highlight the different types of abusive preemption that target local authority to protect LGBTQ+ individuals.

In a new paper from Local Solutions Support Center, Curricular Preemption: The New Front of an Old Culture War, we discuss the growing trend of curricular preemption and its impact on local school districts.

During the 2022 state legislative session Local Solutions Support Center (LSSC) publishes a weekly digest summarizing notable abusive preemption bills and their progress through session.

Determining whether local governments have authority to implement local tenant protections, particularly in the face of potential state preemption, remains a challenge.

A new white paper from LSSC explores in more detail how some state legislatures are using preemption to undermine local control of police budgeting, accountability, and management.

This snapshot identifies states where abusive preemption bills have been enacted or are pending in 2021. In some states, multiple bills addressing the same issues have been introduced, but that is not reflected in this data.

A bill amended Indiana statutes on a number of housing-related issues, including preempting localities from adopting ordinances on foundation and size requirements for manufactured homes and preempting local ordinances regulating retaliatory acts by landlords.

This fact sheet, produced in partnership with ChangeLab Solutions, summarizes this emerging threat to state and local public health authority and identifies some of the possible outcomes.

The Local Solutions Support Center has compiled short memos summarizing the nature and scope of local authority in each state.

In this resource, we examine how, as the Black Lives Matter movement strengthens nationwide and communities push for critical changes to confront racism, preemption has once again emerged as a tool to stifle important local efforts.

As the definition of “public health” expands, so could the ability of public health agencies and officials to address the SDOH and combat a greater variety of public ills.

This fact sheet provides an overview of state and local government authority to regulate and potentially require vaccination.

In the wake of recent demonstrations against racist police and vigilante violence against Black communities, we will likely see increased legislative attacks on protestors.

This memo aims only to engage in a preliminary way with the question of what a state’s grant of emergency authority to local governments means for localities facing the COVID-19 crisis.

Bostock undoubtedly represents a huge victory for LGBTQ rights in the United States, but it does not mark the end of the fight for LGBTQ equality.

As part of the Local Solutions Support Center’s ongoing efforts to help local leaders understand and deploy their authority to address their communities’ needs, we have produced this memo outlining legal possibilities and prohibitions.

This memo aims to engage in a preliminary way with the question of what a state’s grant of emergency authority to local governments means for localities facing the COVID-19 crisis.

This groundbreaking new framework lays out a vision for rebalancing state and local relations, and provides model constitutional language to encourage legal reform.

A troubling trend has emerged where state legislators move to punish local legislators for supporting or voting for policies that state legislators oppose.

As more localities step up to lead on LGBTQ rights, there is a growing threat to this local progress.

This memorandum provides an overview of some substantive and procedural constraints on the latitude of state legislatures to limit local authority and autonomy.

When preemption is used to protect profits rather than people, to undermine progress, and to undo cities and counties’ efforts to improve the safety of their residents— including their LGBT residents—it is a dangerous threat to equality for all.

This fact sheet details two straightforward approaches that can be pursued through ballot initiatives or statewide legislation to do so.

As more localities step up to lead on LGBTQ rights, there is a growing threat to this local progress.

Federal preemption is the concept that ‘federal law preempts contrary state law.’

In a new paper from A Better Balance, Local Solutions Support Center, and Equality Federation, we trace the local roots of LGBTQ+ equality in the United States and highlight the different types of abusive preemption that target local authority to protect LGBTQ+ individuals.

States have begun to impair or eradicate whole realms of local authority entirely. This White Paper explains the historical underpinnings of this rapidly emerging trend, the forms this preemption is taking, and the reasons why structural change to bolster local authority in the face of this new preemption is ever-more critical.

In a new paper from Local Solutions Support Center, Curricular Preemption: The New Front of an Old Culture War, we discuss the growing trend of curricular preemption and its impact on local school districts.

Preempting Progress: States Take Aim at Local Prosecutors examines how as local communities have called on prosecutors to use their discretion to embrace reform and a less carceral approach to criminal justice, states have intervened in an attempt to force prosecutors to continue tough-on-crime policies.

Some states have begun to use preemption to force localities to criminalize camping in public, taking local resources away from proven solutions that could address the root causes of homelessness. Rather than solve the crisis, this preemption exacerbates it by punishing people who can find shelter nowhere else.

As part of the Local Solutions Support Center’s ongoing efforts to help local leaders understand and deploy their authority to address their communities’ needs, we have produced this memo outlining what local election administration involves and how it threatens democracy.

This White Paper considers the consequences of decreasing state aid to cities and offers some suggestions for policies that would allow municipalities to better carry out their important responsibilities as engines of local democracy.

This white paper captures how defending local democracy now includes a growing focus on recovering lost local authority and summarizes key lessons learned so far in the fight to repeal existing preemption.

In this white paper, we document how Juul has flooded statehouses with lobbyists to advance T-21 legislation – bills to raise the purchase age of tobacco to 21, but that include poison pill measures preempting local governments from further regulating tobacco products.

The unfortunate result of this burgeoning legislative movement to adopt statue statutes and other punitive preemption measures has been the erosion of local democracy, the stifling of local political innovation, and the undermining of local faith in the democratic process.

There is now an active anti-sanctuary movement aimed at eliminating the discretion that local communities have traditionally exercised over their involvement in the federal immigration enforcement efforts.

It is essential that state legislatures accurately represent the statewide public’s views when legislating with respect to local power. In too many states, highly gerrymandered state legislatures do not accurately represent the public’s views.

All preemption laws are in tension with local democracy, but punitive preemption is especially threatening. Many state preemption laws are vague around the edges; some may violate the state’s constitution or legal doctrines.

One of the most troubling recent trends is the rise of “blanket” preemption in the states, described by the New York Times as efforts to “…[wall] off whole new realms where local governments aren’t allowed to govern at all.”

This pathbreaking reader presents and analyzes in concise form the most important preemption statutes and cases, along with commentary from the leading scholars in the field.

This Article describes this politics by way of assessing the nature of—and reasons for—the hostility to city lawmaking. It also provides a current accounting of state preemptive legislation and assesses the cities’ potential legal and political defenses.

This Essay examines the spread of the new preemption and explores the legal doctrines available to local governments for challenging it.

This Issue Brief surveys the landscape of state preemption and offers “possibilities for strengthening home rule to advance progressive local policymaking.”