In March 2019, ILR released its groundbreaking white paper, Mitigating Municipality Litigation: Scope and Solutions, which examined a then-emergent surge in litigation by cities, counties, and other political subdivisions seeking to harness the business community with responsibility for a wide range of societal ills.
Two years later, that trend has experienced massive growth, with thousands of locality plaintiffs asserting claims that, until recently, were understood to belong to states alone. This edition of ILR Briefly provides an overview of the basic aspects of this trend, including the factors that are driving municipality litigation, the problems it raises, and recent developments in high-profile cases. Finally, this paper summarizes the various, mainly legislative solutions that state leaders might pursue—and that some have enacted already—to curb municipality litigation.
