Professor David Schleicher Delivers Inaugural Walter E. Meyer Lecture
Professor David N. Schleicher delivered his inaugural lecture as Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law before an audience of friends, family, and members of the Yale community at the Law School on Oct. 27.
Interim Dean and Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law Yair Listokin ’05 offered introductory remarks in which he commended Schleicher for his scholarly work and chair appointment.
“The Walter E. Meyer Chair was established in 1965 to support investigation, research, and study that would throw light on matters which will be of aid in securing to humanity a greater degree of justice, whether through the courts, through government — local, national, or international — or through a better understanding of human relations,” said Listokin. “David’s work most certainly does that.”
Listokin defined the theme of Schleicher’s work as “identifying a place where incentives are misaligned as a result of institutional structure.”
“I think another characteristic of David’s work is very much that these very local problems often have big macro effects,” said Listokin, adding that his writing always includes practical solutions — like proposing changes to institutional structures — in addition to his legal analyses.
Schleicher’s lecture, titled “Broken Machines: Law and the Challenge of Making Big Cities Work,” argued that major American cities feature a “wide distance in the quality of services provided by the public and private sector,” discussing, among other things, the high cost of building transportation infrastructure in America and New York City’s antiquated approach to trash removal.
“Today we have a crisis in urban public services, but we have something worse than that — we have a puzzle,” said Schleicher. “Why can’t the richest country in the history of the world provide a decent level of urban public services, despite spending lots of money, in the very centers of its imperium?”
Schleicher, who’s had a passion for studying cities from a young age, outlined why that’s the case through several points. In America, most “state capacity” — the ability to implement policies and regulations in order to govern effectively — exists in state and local governments, as opposed to at the federal level. But state capacity in big cities is weak, Schleicher argued, because it is unaccountable, as neither “exit” nor “voice,” puts much pressure on big cities to provide services well or in a cost-effective fashion. Politics has nationalized while services remain local. Voters with a preference for a Democratic or Republican president vote similarly in state and local elections regardless of the actual performance of officials at the local level. Further, factors that encourage citizens to move out of particular locations to punish poor service delivery do not work to constrain governments in big cities as well as they do in suburban areas, because “agglomeration economies” in big cities make populations sticky. Further, our reliance on “exit” to hold local governments accountable creates other problems, like inter-local inequality and pressure on governments to adopt excessively strict land use controls. In the absence of party competition or exit pressure, big city local governments fall into “distributive politics” norms, giving into interest group pressures and neighborhood groups, rather than focusing on providing services well.
If you want to know who’s really at fault, it’s you and me. We have allowed our local institutions to decline, and as a result we suffer from the services we get.”
—Professor David N. Schleicher
Schleicher concluded his lecture by offering solutions to the degradation in local services, which could include reinvigorating local branches of political parties, giving mayors more power, or supporting local media through subsidies or donations.
But who is to blame for these services falling apart in the first place?
“If you want to know who’s really at fault, it’s you and me,” said Schleicher. “We have allowed our local institutions to decline, and as a result we suffer from the services we get.”
Schleicher added that there will need to be a period of rebuilding government capacity, especially at the local level, to address the country’s broader decline in trust in democratic institutions.
Schleicher’s lecture also included a tribute to the chair’s namesake, Walter E. Meyer, and Bob Ellickson ’66, the emeritus holder of the chair at Yale Law School and an influential figure in Schleicher’s work.
Schleicher has taught at the Law School since 2015 and is an expert in local government law, land use, federalism, state and local finance, and urban development. His critically acclaimed book, “In a Bad State: Responding to State and Local Fiscal Crises,” published in 2023, offered federal policymakers “a practical guide” for when states and cities cannot pay their debts and used economics, political science, law, and history to explain what the federal government can — and cannot — do to provide for the general welfare during state and local defaults.
Prior to coming to Yale Law School, Schleicher held positions at Georgetown, Harvard, New York University, and George Mason University School of Law, where he won the university’s Teaching Excellence Award.
