Home Rule in New York State

Home rule in the United States has for many years been confined to the states west of the Mississippi. As late as 1920 Ohio and Michigan were the only eastern states giving their cities autonomy. Since that date, however, there has appeared a tendency in the larger urban industrial states to treat cities more generously. New York in 1923 and Pennsylvania in 1924 have now joined the ranks of home-rule states. But many of the largest states, for example, Illinois, still give no such power to their municipalities, while in Massachusetts it can still be said that cities have the same legal status as “an infant, an idiot or a lunatic.†The addition of New York to this group has just been rendered certain. On September 2, the court of appeals of the state rendered a unanimous decision declaring the home-rule amendment to have been validly adopted. This ended two months of uncertainty caused by the decision of the appellate division of the supreme court in New York City that the home-rule amendment was not validly a part of the constitution and that all state and local legislation passed under its aegis was void.