How Wealth Rules the World by Ben G. Price

Author:Ben G. Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2019-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

Anti-Dillon: It Didn’t Have to Be This Way

To the continued chagrin of the friends of democracy, the legal establishment, at the same time that it embraced John Forrest Dillon’s legal theory, rejected the opinion of Michigan Supreme Court judge Thomas Cooley, one of the era’s leading scholars of constitutional law. Cooley argued that municipalities receive their power directly from the people and thus have a kind of limited autonomy. It is the state’s power to curtail local authority that is limited—by general rights.

Cooley wrote in 1871 that “the sovereign people had delegated only part of their sovereignty to the states. They preserved the remainder for themselves in written and unwritten constitutional limitations on governmental actions. One important limitation was the people’s right to local self-government.”8

Cooley argued that for the people to create state legislatures and then subordinate themselves to their dictates would be absurd. It would contradict the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence, which says that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But through a long chain of decisions, the courts have generally rejected Cooley. Dillon’s Rule was not a legally necessary conclusion. It was a choice made by judges to side with property against general rights.

Officials elected to merely administer state law within local jurisdictions cower in the shadow of Dillon’s Rule. Using the single most often heard excuse for why they cannot or will not enact protective measures when requested by residents of the municipality, they regularly inform their local constituents that they “wish they could help, but their hands are tied.”

During a weekend Democracy School, I presented the municipal structure of local governance to members of the Lakota nation residing at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. A class participant gazed at an illustration I’d drawn on a flip chart. After some silent contemplation, she announced: “Huh, the white man’s municipalities are just reservations, like ours. The difference is, we know we live on reservations. The white man doesn’t.”

That about sums it up.

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