I'm delighted to say that we'll be joined this coming week by Prof. David Schleicher from George Mason University School of Law (say, haven't I heard of that law school before?). Prof. Schleicher teaches local government law and civil procedure, and writes about these things as well as his main focus, election law.

A few months ago, I read Prof. Schleicher's fascinating Why Is There No Partisan Competition in City Council Elections? The Role of Election Law, 23 J. L. & Politics 419 (2007), and thought our readers would enjoy learning about Prof. Schleicher's arguments -- arguments about why big city local elections do not feature much partisan competition, and about why this is a problem for scholarly understandings of how parties operate, for localism, and for cities themselves. I'm much looking forward to Prof. Schleicher's posts.