Terry Firma: Background Democracy and Constitutional Foundations

Ages ago, I had the excellent luck to fall into a collaboration with Terrance Sandalow to produce a casebook now long forgotten. There could have been no more bracing or beneficial learning experience for a fledgling legal scholar (meaning me). What brought us together indeed was luck from my standpoint, but it was enterprise, too – the brokerage of an alert West Publishing Company editor picking up on a casual remark of mine as he made one of his regular sweeps through Harvard Law School. A novice law professor, I mentioned to him how much I admired a new essay in the field of local government law (a subject I was just then trying to learn) by someone I didn’t know but who lived in that editor’s home town of Minneapolis-Saint Paul. The essay was Terrance Sandalow’s since-become-classic piece on municipal home rule, and the West editor arranged to bring the two of us together to discuss the casebook project that in fact materialized.