October 23 - Preemption

Confederate Statutes and State Preemption Statutes

This webinar will discuss the rise of the use of state “statue statutes” to prevent local governments form removing Confederate statuary, with implications for municipal attorneys across the country. The debate over Confederate iconography has been hugely divisive and in some cases has led to violence, as in Charlottesville in August 2017. These controversies have also led to litigation over the ability for local governments to remove Confederate statues. The webinar will examine the history of Confederate monument building, the nature of the laws that restrict their removal, and the types of legal challenges that have been brought both by parties seeking the removal of statues and those contesting those removals. As the debate over the legacy of the Confederacy, its leaders, and its admirers intensifies, and with white supremacist rhetoric and violence once again becoming commonplace, disagreements over the future of Confederate monuments in public spaces are only going to become more frequent, testing the nature of local power and the role of local officials, as is increasing happening with preemption conflicts in many states.

Speaker: Richard Schragger

Richard Schragger is the Perre Bowen Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he has taught since 2002. He is also a Senior Academic Fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of constitutional law and local government law, federalism, urban policy, and the constitutional and economic status of cities. He also writes about church and state. He is the author of City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age (Oxford 2016), along with numerous articles and book chapters.  Schragger has been a visiting professor at a number of law schools including Georgetown, NYU, Columbia, and Chicago, and has presented his work at Harvard’s Center for Municipal Innovation, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at the Kennedy School, the Urban Affairs Association Annual Meeting, and at numerous law schools. He received his JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, and clerked for Chief Judge Dolores Sloviter on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.