State Law

Thanks for comments from participants in the Symposium, Reassessing the State and Local Government Toolkit at The University of Chicago Law School and a faculty workshop at New York University School of Law.

Thanks to Michael Abramowicz, William Baude, A.J. Bellia, Stephanos Bibas, Frederic Bloom, Curtis Bradley, Mark Chenoweth, Eric Claeys, Brad Clark, Richard Epstein, Brian Fitzpatrick, Rick Garnett, Jack Goldsmith, John Harrison, John Inazu, Greg Jacob, Ashley Keller, Gary Lawson, Jason Mazzone, Tom Miles, Adam Mortara, Nelson Lund, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, David Strauss, Eugene Volokh, and to workshop participants at George Mason University and the Virginia Junior Faculty Forum for comments.

I am grateful to Barry Adler, Christopher Bruner, Joshua Fairfield, Anna Gelpern, Clay Gillette, Claire Hill, Margaret Howard, Richard Hynes, Tom Jackson, Lyman Johnson, John Langbein, Michael McConnell, Joshua Rauh, Roberta Romano, and to participants at the Yale Law School Corporate Law Center breakfast program in New York City, the State and Municipal Default Workshop at the Hoover Institution, the law and economics seminar at the University of Minnesota Law School, and a faculty workshop at Washington and Lee School of Law for helpful comments and conversation; to Bill Draper for comments and legislative analysis; to Elizabeth Hendee, Albert Lichy, David Payne, and Spencer Pepper for research assistance; to the University of Pennsylvania Law School for generous summer funding; and to the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review for terrific editorial suggestions.

We thank Jim Brudney, Annie Decker, Jeffrey Dobbins, Amanda Frost, Abbe Gluck, Helen Hershkoff, the Honorable Hans Linde (retired Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court), Jeffrey Pojanowski, David Pozen, and Mark Tushnet for incisive comments on earlier drafts; Michelle Anderson, Richard Schragger, Richard Briffault, Rick Hills, and Howie Erichson for conversations about aspects of this project; and Joseph Struble for research assistance. Portions of this Article were presented at the 2012 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, where the audience provided helpful feedback. Professor Leib also thanks the one hundred or so students in his Legislation classes at UC Berkeley and at UC Hastings who provided an answer on a final exam to the question of how, if at all, elected judges should interpret statutes differently from their federal counterparts.