Brian Highsmith

Digging a Hole: The Legal Theory Podcast

On this week’s podcast, we’re going more local than we’ve ever gone before, discussing the pleasures and perils of the company town. Here to be our local guide through this topic, and discussing his forthcoming paper, “Governing the Company Town” is Brian Highsmith — a former student of David’s, Ph.D. candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University, an academic fellow in law and political economy at Harvard Law School, and an affiliated senior researcher at Yale Law School’s Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law.

We begin this conversation by discussing what the company town was and what it wasn’t, legally and historically. Highsmith proposes that Madison’s theory of factions is the best conceptual framework to understand company towns, while Sam pushes back on company towns as being uniquely subject to private power. After we engage in a bit of democratic theory, David presses Highsmith on whether the answer to bad localism is good localism, and how we might regulate the municipal race to the bottom. Give the pod a listen and find out.

This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review.

Referenced Readings

• Federalist 10 by James Madison

• Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian

• “The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down” by Rachel Corbett

• “Regulating Location Incentives” by Brian Highsmith

• “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” by Flora Lewis