Blue Cities, Red States: The Troubling Turn in State Preemption

Increasingly, states are attempting to shut down local innovation through preemptive legislation that overrides local lawmaking - threatening to withhold state funding from sanctuary cities, precluding civil rights protections for LGBTQ citizens, prohibiting cities form raising the minimum wage for their workers, and blocking gun violence prevention laws. Critics argue that these efforts are stifling local democracy. IN some cases, preemption efforts have even gone so far as to impose criminal liability on city officials who merely vote for progressive legal reforms. How widespread is this aggressive campaign of state preemption and what legal strategies are available to cities to fight back?

Featuring:

Nestor Davidson, Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law, Fordham University School of Law
Olatunde Johnson, Jerome B. Sherman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Hon. Jon Russell, Director, American City County Exchange; Councilman, Town of Culpeper, Virginia
Ames Simmons, Director of Transgender Policy, Equality North America
Adam Skaggs, Chief Counsel, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence