Wikipedia Deep Dive

John Forrest Dillon

9 min read

The Judge Who Decided Cities Have No Rights

Here's a question that shapes your daily life more than you probably realize: Does your city have any inherent right to govern itself? Can it make decisions about zoning, taxes, or local ordinances without permission from the state capital?

For most of American history, the answer has been a resounding no. And that answer traces back to one man: John Forrest Dillon, a nineteenth-century judge from Iowa whose legal doctrine still determines what your local government can and cannot do.

The principle he articulated is blunt, almost brutal in its clarity. Cities, Dillon wrote, "owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from, the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so may it destroy."

In other words, your city exists only because your state allows it to exist. And anything the state gives, the state can take away.

An Unlikely Path to Legal Influence

John Forrest Dillon was born on Christmas Day, 1831, in what is now Fulton County, New York. His first career choice wasn't law—it was medicine. He earned his medical degree from the University of Iowa in 1850, at just eighteen years old.

But two years later, he changed course entirely. He "read law," which in that era meant studying legal texts and apprenticing with practicing attorneys rather than attending a formal law school. By 1852, he had hung out his shingle in Davenport, Iowa.

His rise through the legal system was remarkably swift. County attorney at twenty-two. District court judge at twenty-six. Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court at thirty. And in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him to the federal bench, where he would serve on the United States Circuit Court for the Eighth Circuit.

It was during this period that Dillon wrote the treatise that would cement his legacy.

The Book That Changed American Government

In 1872, Dillon published Municipal Corporations, one of the first comprehensive legal analyses of how cities and towns relate to higher levels of government. The book became enormously influential—not because it was revolutionary in its thinking, but because it systematized and clarified ideas that had been floating around American jurisprudence for decades.

Dillon's central argument was a matter of legal logic. States, he observed, possess all governmental powers not explicitly denied them by the state constitution or the federal Constitution. They are, in legal terms, "plenary"—meaning complete and unlimited in their authority over internal affairs.

But cities? Cities are different. Cities are creatures of state law. They exist because the state legislature created them, and they possess only three types of powers:

Powers expressly granted to them by the state
Powers necessarily implied by those express grants
Powers essential to the municipality's basic existence

If a city wants to do something that doesn't fit into one of these three categories, it simply cannot do it. Full stop.

This formulation became known as "Dillon's Rule," and it remains the default framework for understanding municipal power in the majority of American states.

The Opposing View: Home Rule

Not everyone agreed with Dillon. In 1871, just a year after Dillon articulated his position, a Michigan Supreme Court judge named Thomas M. Cooley offered a starkly different vision.

"Local government is a matter of absolute right," Cooley wrote in a concurring opinion, "and the state cannot take it away."

This became known as the Cooley Doctrine, or more commonly, the principle of "home rule." Under this view, cities possess an inherent, almost constitutional right to self-governance. The state didn't create local government—local government is a natural outgrowth of people living together in communities. The state merely recognizes what already exists.

The philosophical difference is profound. Under Dillon's Rule, your city is a subsidiary of the state, existing at the state's pleasure. Under home rule, your city is a partner with the state, possessing its own sphere of legitimate authority.

Think of it this way: Dillon's Rule treats cities like children who need permission for everything. Home rule treats them like adults who can manage their own affairs.

The Supreme Court Weighs In

The United States Supreme Court settled the federal constitutional question in 1907 with Hunter v. Pittsburgh. The facts of the case were simple but emotionally charged: Pennsylvania had voted to merge the city of Allegheny into Pittsburgh, and a majority of Allegheny's residents had voted against the merger.

Did they have any constitutional recourse? Could a city's residents prevent their state from abolishing their city against their will?

The Supreme Court said no. Citing Dillon's treatise directly, the Court declared that states could "alter or abolish at will the charters of municipal corporations" without violating anyone's constitutional rights. Cities, under federal constitutional law, have no protected existence.

The Court later reinforced this principle in Trenton v. New Jersey, stating with cold clarity that "municipalities have no inherent right of self-government which is beyond the legislative control of the state, but are merely departments of the state."

Merely departments of the state. Not communities of citizens with their own democratic mandates. Not expressions of local self-determination. Departments.

But States Can Choose Otherwise

Here's the crucial nuance that often gets lost in discussions of Dillon's Rule: the Supreme Court didn't say states must treat cities as subordinate entities. It said the federal Constitution doesn't prevent them from doing so.

States are free to grant their cities home rule powers. Many have done exactly that, either through legislation or constitutional amendments. Today, the landscape is a patchwork. Some states follow Dillon's Rule strictly. Others grant broad home rule authority. Many fall somewhere in between, with different rules for different types of municipalities or different subject matters.

The practical implications are enormous. In a strict Dillon's Rule state, if a city wants to raise the minimum wage above the state level, ban plastic bags, or regulate short-term rentals, it can only do so if the state has specifically authorized such action. In a home rule state, the city can generally act unless the state has specifically prohibited it.

The difference is between a list of permitted activities and a list of forbidden ones. And as anyone who has dealt with bureaucracy knows, which approach you take changes everything.

Modern Battlegrounds

Dillon's Rule continues to shape American politics in ways that rarely make headlines but constantly affect policy outcomes. When cities try to pass local ordinances on contentious issues—gun regulations, LGBTQ protections, environmental standards, labor laws—state legislatures often invoke Dillon's Rule to strike them down.

This dynamic has become particularly heated in recent years as many American cities have become more politically progressive than their surrounding states. The result is a form of political trench warfare, with cities pushing the boundaries of their authority and states pushing back.

A Virginia case from 2000, Arlington County v. White, illustrates how Dillon's Rule operates in practice. The court used the rule to invalidate municipal action, following the strict interpretation that if the state hasn't explicitly granted a power, the city doesn't have it.

Meanwhile, courts in other states have taken the minority, critical view. A 1980 Utah case, State v. Hutchison, represents this skeptical approach to the rigidity of Dillon's framework.

The Man Beyond the Rule

After a decade on the federal bench, Dillon resigned in 1879 to pursue other opportunities. He joined the Columbia University law faculty, then built a lucrative private practice in New York City, and spent a year as a professor at Yale, where he delivered a series of lectures on English and American jurisprudence.

His family life contained both ordinary happiness and extraordinary tragedy. He married Anna Margery Price in 1853, and they had three children together. But in July 1898, Anna and their daughter Annie died in one of the great maritime disasters of the era—the sinking of the French ocean liner La Bourgogne, which killed over five hundred people.

Dillon lived until 1914, dying in New York City at eighty-two. A memorial fountain was erected in his honor in downtown Davenport in 1918, carved from Indiana limestone in the Romanesque style.

An Unexpected Family Connection

Legal history occasionally intersects with other kinds of history in surprising ways. John Forrest Dillon had a sister who married a merchant named John B. Jordan. Their daughter Jennie married a man named Louis Stengel.

Louis and Jennie Stengel had a son who would become one of the most famous figures in baseball history: Casey Stengel, the legendary manager who led the New York Yankees to seven World Series championships and later managed the expansion New York Mets with a combination of wit and exasperation that made him a beloved figure.

So the judge who determined that American cities have no inherent rights was the great-uncle of the man who once said, "Been in this game a hundred years, but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed." Perhaps that sentiment applies to municipal governance as well.

Why This Matters Now

The question Dillon addressed in 1868 isn't merely academic. It goes to the heart of how we organize democratic life. Should decisions be made as close to the people affected as possible? Or should higher levels of government maintain control to ensure uniformity and prevent a patchwork of local rules?

Both positions have merit. Dillon's Rule prevents the chaos of every municipality making up its own rules about fundamental matters. It ensures that businesses and citizens can understand the legal landscape without studying fifty different city codes. It reflects the constitutional reality that states, not cities, are the primary units of American federalism.

But home rule respects the diversity of American communities. What works in a dense urban center may not work in a rural town. Local knowledge matters. And there's something troubling about telling millions of citizens that their democratically elected local government has no inherent authority to address their concerns.

The next time you wonder why your city can't do something that seems obviously within its purview, or why your state legislature seems to spend so much time overriding local ordinances, remember John Forrest Dillon. A doctor-turned-lawyer from Iowa, writing in 1868, still shapes the boundaries of what your city council can decide.

His rule breathed a particular kind of life into American local government—a dependent life, subordinate and limited. Whether that breath should be expanded or further constrained remains one of the enduring questions of American democracy.