Failing Better

38 Pages Posted: 20 Mar 2024

See all articles by Michael Francus

Michael Francus

University of Notre Dame - Notre Dame Law School

Date Written: February 21, 2024

Abstract

Puerto Rico. Detroit. Stockton. Arkansas. Each of these places stands as a testament to the import of municipal debt crises and their capacity to immiserate millions of people. Such crises gut core public services, devastate economies, and turn places into shadows of their former selves. So new scholarship that grapples with those crises, promising to better understand and ameliorate them, well deserves the public’s attention.

All the more so is David Schleicher’s new book, In a Bad State, worthy of such attention. The book offers a novel conceptual framework for understanding municipal debt crises, one that will lay a foundation for the field going forward. More than that, Schleicher translates that framework into recommendations for officials facing a municipal debt crisis, offering ways to ameliorate those crises and the very human catastrophes they wreak.

But there is also much more to be said. Using Schleicher’s work as a jumping-off point, this Review details the causes of municipal debt crises. In doing so, it reveals the structure of modern municipal finance, how that structure lends itself to crises, and what the causes of those crises tells us about how best to hone the responses to crises to minimize the inevitable human suffering that arises in their wake.

Keywords: municipal finance, bankruptcy, local government, public finance, federalism

Suggested Citation

Francus, Michael, Failing Better (February 21, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4734561 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4734561

Michael Francus (Contact Author)

University of Notre Dame - Notre Dame Law School ( email )

Eck Hall of Law
Notre Dame, IN 46556
United States

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