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The United States is a nation of counties with a latent romance for towns. The development of American local government law from the arrival of the first Europeans was defined by two opposing visions of settlement and local governance. On the one hand was the county, with its roots in the dispersed settlements and plantations of the South. On the other hand, was the town, with its roots in the communitarian congregational theocracies of New England. These models contrasted and competed in the on-the-ground progress of settler colonialism, and they contrasted and competed in the theoretical debates over how Americans should define themselves and the project of a growing continental nation/empire. On the ground, it was the dispersed settlement, protection of property rights, and minimal government of counties that spread and shaped most local government development from first arrival to 1800. But in the eyes of elites, political theorists, and the founders of the 1780s, the orderly and collective idea of the town remained a figure of political imagination and aspiration. This idealism was written into the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This Article tells the history of these competing modes of settlement and imagination and how they have shaped local government law in the United States from the colonial project and into the imperial project of westward expansion. In so doing, it describes and unsettles the shape of our present local government law. Everyone who lives in the United States lives within the boundaries of at least one local government. Almost all of us live within a county boundary, and many of us live within a separate municipal boundary—in a town or a city. The structure of these governments and the differences between them not only shape the legal landscape of the most sprawling and diverse area of American public law (local government law); they also shape residents’ lived experiences and civic imaginations. It matters where people live and how they are governed there. Because it matters, the formation and adjustment of local government systems and their boundaries have been subjects of contestation, theorizing, and political imagination from the beginning of the colonization of North America. Not only has that contestation shaped the world we live in today, but it shapes the ongoing process of local government change, development, and administration.

Coercive police interrogation tactics create psychological pressures that are known to lead to false confessions. False confessions in turn produce the potential for wrongful convictions, imprisoning innocent people for crimes they did not commit. The current legal doctrine surrounding how courts analyze the validity of a suspect’s confession rests on whether the confession was voluntarily made. In making this determination, most courts use a preponderance of the evidence standard, validating a confession upon a finding that it was more likely than not voluntarily given. By implementing a higher standard, such as beyond a reasonable doubt, judges would be forced to more carefully view the circumstances surrounding a confession. Theoretically, a higher standard would lead to fewer confessions being admitted into evidence, which would be especially impactful in cases where a false confession is the only evidence the prosecution has against the defendant. This Note argues that a change is imperative and that state courts must raise their voluntariness standard to limit the number of wrongful incarcerations. Some states, like Massachusetts, have already done this. Additionally, this paper argues that the Massachusetts rule is the best equipped at attacking this issue because it provides multiple barriers to the admission of such evidence and forces members of the jury to more intensely consider the confession and its surrounding circumstances.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a developing technology that creates unique images, essays, and other outputs based on a user’s prompt. To train AI to produce such outputs, however, the program requires a large dataset to learn from—datasets that typically contain many human artists’ copyrighted works. AI’s reliance on these datasets potentially implicates copyright law when its outputs bear similarities to human artists’ works. This Note focuses on the legal challenges brought by and available to freelance visual artists, whose livelihoods are particularly vulnerable to AI image generation because they rely on social media and informal work-for-pay relationships. This Note argues that the generally accepted Fair Use analysis that AI outputs are obviously transformative fails to consider the full implications of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith decision and the potential impact of AI generated images replacing freelance social media artists. This Note advocates that courts should seize the opportunity of emerging copyright litigation to definitively hold that AI generated images are not inherently transformative.