Executive Orders
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An executive order (EO) directs the actions of governmental officials and/or outlines policies and procedures for the executive branch to implement and uphold. It can be mandated by a president at the national scale, a governor at the state scale, or a mayor at the municipal scale. The EOs in our archive are all from the municipal scale.
Since the executive branch of government is tasked with crafting and carrying out the law, executive orders are functionally similar to other laws (Anderson 2002; Garner 2014, 690). With this being said, whether or not a municipal EO is properly constructed and thus legally binding depends on to whom the directive is issued and whether or not the City Charter explicitly grants such power to the executive officer. EOs can be overturned or overruled by city council, Congress, or a court.
You can peruse the collection of EOs by scrolling through the policies below or using the filters to sort them by issue date, author, title, or subject. Please note that some of the filters, such as department and graduation year, are not applicable to this project. Also, the title filter only captures the first few letters of a title and the policy titles all begin with the designation of the type of policy so searching within this filter will not be as illustrative as the other filters. Once you click on a filter, you can search within that filter by entering in a place name or a few letters of an author, for instance, and then clicking the browse button.
There are 11 executive orders in our archive. Please note that in the case of San Francisco, the EO was put forth by the city and county of San Francisco. We include this policy in our tally for cities that passed policies.
References: Anderson, L. (2002). Executive orders, “The very definition of tyranny”, and the Congressional solution, the separation of Powers Restoration Act. Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 589, 1–25.
Garner, B. (Ed.) (2014). Black’s law dictionary, tenth edition. Thomson Reuters.
This page was last updated in July 2024.