While the importance of municipal bonds for the provision of public services is well-documented, the consequences of municipal bankruptcies remain understudied. We contribute to this literature by studying the effects of municipal bankruptcies on crime. Using the staggered...

What sorts of legal relief should be available to a municipality in financial distress? Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code has served as an option of last resort for many municipalities over the years. But as this Article illustrates, Chapter 9 arguably falls short of an effective solution and at...

This paper, which was written as a White Paper for the Federalist Society, describes and assesses the question whether public employee pensions can be restructured in bankruptcy, with a particular focus on Detroit. Part I gives a brief overview both of the treatment of pensions under state law,...

Almost 95% of long-term municipal bonds have callable features, and despite low interest rates, we find that a substantial fraction of local governments exercise these options with significant delays. Using data from 2001 to 2018, we estimate that U.S. municipals lost over $31 billion from...

Calls for reforming the civil rights enforcement regime often focus on individual government officers. Recent years have brought demands to abolish qualified immunity—a defense that protects individual officers from liability so long as they did not violate clearly established law—and to end...

"Cities require infrastructure as they grow and persist; infrastructure requires funding, typically from the bond market. But the bond market is not a neutral player. In this groundbreaking book, Destin Jenkins suggests that questions of urban infrastructure are inherently also questions of...