Working With Cases And Materials On State And Local Government Law Richard Briffault
Most law schools treat this casebook as a rite of passage for students taking state and local government law. It covers municipal law, home rule, state preemption, intergovernmental relations, and fiscal federalism in a fairly dense format. If you are trying to use it effectively without losing your mind, here is how to approach it. The Briffault casebook is not structured like a traditional contracts book where each chapter builds neatly on the last. The topics jump between constitutional constraints, statutory frameworks, and policy questions. You will find chapters on Dillon's Rule versus home rule, the Tax Reform Act's impact on municipalities, fair share housing obligations, and intergovernmental jurisdiction disputes. The material is heavy. Some professors assign the entire thing over one semester, which means you are reading roughly 1,200 pages of cases, statutes, and secondary commentary. I ran into a specific problem last year when a client was dealing with a municipal zoning ordinance that conflicted with a state housing mandate. The casebook had sections on both Mount Laurel doctrine and state home rule statutes, but the discussion was scattered across different chapters. The index pointed me toward pages 450 through 510 for fair housing, but the actual statutory analysis I needed was buried in a footnote on page 892. I ended up cross-referencing three different sections before finding the interaction between the state statute and the municipal ordinance. My workaround was to skip straight to the statutory appendix at the back of the book first, then read the surrounding cases with the actual text in front of me. That saved me about two hours of hunting through footnotes.
One thing the casebook does not make clear early on is that state and local government law operates differently than federal constitutional law. In federal courts, you have standing doctrines and political question barriers that filter out a lot of claims. In state courts, the threshold for bringing a case against a municipality is often much lower. You will see cases involving water rights, sewer hookups, and sidewalk maintenance that would never survive a motion to dismiss in federal court. The Briffault text touches on this implicitly, but it does not hammer home the procedural divergence until later chapters. Another counter-intuitive point is the way home rule actually functions in practice. Most students walk into this course thinking home rule means municipalities can do whatever they want. It does not. Home rule charters are still subordinate to state law, and state legislatures regularly override local ordinances through preemption statutes. I once worked a case where a city council passed an ordinance regulating short-term rentals under their home rule authority, and the state attorney general's office struck it down within six months using a blanket preemption statute that had nothing to do with the specific subject matter. The casebook has a section on this around pages 310 to 340, but the real-world lesson is that home rule is a starting point, not a shield. If you are using this book for a class, read the chapter introductions first. Briffault writes them in a way that maps out the doctrinal landscape before dropping you into the cases. Skipping those introductions makes the case selection feel random, which it is not. The cases are grouped by theme, not by chronological development, so the introductions tell you why certain cases are being read together.
For reference work, the tables of cases and the index are functional but not deep. If you are looking for a specific topic like joint powers agreements or Mello-Roos bonds, the index will get you close, but you may need to browse adjacent entries. The cross-references in the footnotes are usually more reliable than the main index for tracking down related doctrine. The book has limitations. The coverage of local government finance is uneven. Some editions spend significant time on property tax limitations through Prop 13, while giving only a few pages to broader municipal fiscal crises. If your interest is in how cities actually fund services under constrained revenue environments, you will need to supplement this with outside readings on intergovernmental transfers and state aid formulas. The casebook assumes a certain baseline of constitutional law knowledge and does not pause to explain concepts like rational basis review or strict scrutiny in the municipal context. If you are not comfortable with equal protection analysis, the discrimination cases in Chapter 7 will move fast. For students, I recommend buying or borrowing the latest edition you can find. The 2018 and later editions include updated material on municipal bankruptcy cases and the Shelby County decision's impact on local voting rights enforcement. Older editions miss these entirely. The core doctrinal framework stays the same across editions, but the recent case law additions are substantive enough to matter if you are citing cases in a paper or exam.
Get the Full Details
If you need a free version, you will not find a legitimate one. The book is published by Foundation Press and distributed through standard academic channels. Any site offering a full PDF download is either distributing pirated material or posting an incomplete preview. For classroom use, check if your professor has placed a reserve copy at the law library. Many students skip the purchase entirely and rely on library reserves when the course does not require frequent chapter-by-chapter citation. When teaching from this material, some professors pair it with Giles v. Harris or Hunter v. Pittsburgh for the foundational cases, even though those are not featured heavily in the Briffault text. The book covers the modern doctrine well, but the older cases provide useful context for understanding how municipal corporation theory evolved. If you are self-studying, read those older decisions first before diving into the casebook's modern treatment. The appendices in the back contain reproductions of key statutes and model codes. These are useful because they let you see the actual statutory language rather than relying on Briffault's summaries. When briefing a case that turns on a specific statutory provision, print the relevant appendix page and annotate it directly. It makes comparing the statute to the court's interpretation significantly faster than flipping back and forth between the case text and the appendix.
I also found that the casebook's treatment of regional governance and special districts is weaker than its coverage of general-purpose municipalities. If your state has a complex web of school districts, water districts, and transit authorities, the book may not address the specific structure you are studying. Supplement with your state's constitutional provisions and any locally produced municipal manuals. California has excellent resources through the California League of Cities, and New Jersey has similar materials through the Municipal Law Section of the bar association. The bottom line is that Cases And Materials On State And Local Government Law Richard Briffault is a solid reference tool and a workable casebook for courses, but it requires active navigation rather than passive reading. The material does not present itself in a straightforward linear narrative, and the doctrinal intersections are rarely spelled out explicitly. Work with the indexes, read the introductions, use the appendices, and do not assume that home rule means what the phrase sounds like it means. That approach will save you time and prevent a few avoidable mistakes when you are actually applying these concepts outside the classroom.
