![handle is hein.journals/furth81 and id is 1 raw text is: OHIO STATE LAW JOURNAL ONLINE
Service Provision and the Study of Local
Legislatures:
A Response to Professor Zale
NOAH M. KAZIS*
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. LOCAL LEGISLATIVE DESIGN AND PART-TIME LEGISLATURES........2
II. PART-TIME GOVERNMENT OR PART-TIME LEGISLATURES? THE
SIGNIFICANCE OF LOCAL SERVICE PROVISION.................................6
III. CITY STRUCTURES AS CITY SERVICES?: EFFICIENCY AND INTENT
IN LOCAL INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN.................................................10
IV . C O N C L U SIO N ..................................................................................15
Local legislatures are fascinating sites of institutional experimentation,
which legal scholars are only just beginning to describe, much less fully
understand. Kellen Zale's recent Article, Part-Time Government, provides an
investigation into one particular question of institutional design-whether
legislatures operate part-time or full-time-and offers lawmakers valuable
insights into how to make that decision.1 In particular, Zale develops an incisive
distinction between those functions that may go altogether unexercised as a
result of the part-time legislature's diminished capacity, such as constituent
services and other political acts of representation, and those powers that are
redistributed to other actors, especially the executive branch.2 More broadly, the
Article continues to build a growing body of scholarship detailing the
constitutional design of local government, an important shift in a field that has
historically emphasized the intergovernmental relationships of local
government over those governments' internal structures.3
But as this scholarship develops, it is important not to lose sight of one of
local government law's most traditional claims: that local government's special
(though hardly only) role in our federalist system is as a direct service provider.
The federal government, the states, and cities, counties, and school districts all
set education policy, but only the last, local set actually employs the teachers.
This specialization in function bears with it structural consequences. At the local
* Legal Fellow, Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, New York
University School of Law. I am grateful to Nestor Davidson and Clayton Gillette for their
comments and especially to Kellen Zale for inviting this dialogue to take place in print and
in person. Thank you also to the editors at the Ohio State Law Journal for their attentive
work editing this piece.
I Kellen Zale, Part-Time Government, 80 OHIO ST. L.J. 987, 987-95 (2019).
2Id. at 1030-41.
3 Nestor M. Davidson, Localist Administrative Law, 126 YALE L.J. 564, 575 (2017).
2020 ]
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