From Pullman to Starbase: Jurisdictional Fragmentation and the Corporate Enclave

This talk explores the forms of public and private governance that facilitate localized corporate domination, aiming to contextualize contemporary enclaves - like Elon Musk’s municipal incorporations in Texas, Disney’s special district near Orlando, and global “private city” movements - within a longer history of capital-governed communities. I argue that local government law has contributed to the recent reemergence of company-dominated enclaves in the United States, namely by deferring to private governance and facilitating jurisdictional fragmentation. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, proprietors of company-owned towns exercised absolute control over workers through the private law of property and contract. Mining bosses and industrial barons like George Pullman intentionally rejected the municipal form, using dismissal and eviction to enforce company policy as the operative governing authority within their dominions. This strategy became less effective after the New Deal, leading observers to pronounce the demise of the company town. But I show that parallel developments in local government law have allowed the company town’s continuation through new institutional forms, enabling corporate titans to wield public powers without accountability to any broad public. I suggest that territorial and functional fragmentation have facilitated the proliferation of corporate enclaves - allowing spatially-concentrated private capital to secede from public accountability - and evaluate the degree to which these “rotten boroughs” represent a distinctive municipal form, similar to the phantom cities profiled by the late Mike Davis. I conclude by considering the implications of the corporate enclave for current debates about the democratic stakes of local control.

Speaker: Brian Highsmith, UC Los Angeles School of Law