What Actually Happened With the Randolph Todd Case
The case didn't start as a legal paradox. It started as a routine municipal code enforcement matter in a county with about 140,000 residents. A local attorney named Stephen Randolph Todd was hired by a property owner to contest a valuation dispute involving a parcels tax assessment. The assessment was wrong by roughly eighteen percent. The county refused to correct it without a formal hearing, which meant two trips and three months of delay. Todd filed a procedural motion pointing out that the county's own published guidelines contained a contradictory clause about how reassessment dates were calculated. That contradiction is what people are now calling the paradox. Here is the core of it. The county had a statute on the books that said assessments must reflect current market value as of January 1st. It also had a regulation that said any property with an open permit for construction gets reassessed based on projected post-construction value. Todd's client had both. He had an existing structure that the county valued at market rate, and he had a renovation permit that was still in progress. Under the statute, the property should be assessed one way. Under the regulation, it should be assessed another. The two rules couldn't both apply. The county picked the regulation, which inflated his tax bill by nearly twenty-two percent. Todd argued that when a statute and a regulation conflict, the statute controls. The county argued that the regulation was a valid exercise of their administrative authority. That tension — the statutory-overshadowing-regulation conflict in a jurisdiction where the written law actually contradicts the enforced policy — is the paradox. I saw this play out in practice during a similar situation about three years ago. I was handling a zoning variance appeal where the municipality's zoning ordinance explicitly prohibited variance grants for properties within a floodplain, but their own conditional use permit process allowed the same outcome through a different procedural path. The board kept telling applicants to just apply for a CUP instead of a variance, as if that resolved the contradiction. It didn't. The CUP required a public hearing that the variance did not. That extra procedural step cost my client about six thousand dollars and four months of delays. The workaround was simple but nobody seemed to flag it: I cited the specific ordinance section that prohibited the variance and then filed the CUP application with a parallel motion requesting waiver of the public hearing requirement under the municipality's own emergency exemption clause. The exemption clause existed but was almost never used. The board granted it in twelve days. The contradiction remained, but I found a path around it.
The reason Todd's case went national is mostly because of timing and presentation. He didn't file a lengthy brief. He filed a thirty-two-page document that laid out the contradiction in a single chart — statute column on the left, regulation column on the right, red highlighting for every line that didn't align. A legal blogger picked it up. Then a national policy outlet covered it. Then it became a talking point in a couple of state legislative sessions about whether local governments should be allowed to enforce regulations that conflict with their own statutes. There are a few things beginners get wrong about this. First, they assume that pointing out a contradiction is enough. It isn't. Courts and boards generally try to reconcile conflicting provisions rather than strike one down. You have to argue why reconciliation is impossible, not just that the conflict exists. Second, people tend to focus on the substantive outcome — the higher tax bill, the denied variance — when the actual lever is procedural. The statute vs. regulation conflict matters most when it creates a due process problem, not when it creates an unfavorable result. A contradictory rule that produces a bad outcome is just a bad outcome. A contradictory rule that deprives someone of a clear procedural right is constitutional fodder. The paradox has real limitations. It only works when the contradiction is explicit and codified. If the conflict is between two policies that were never formalized in writing, you're in advisory territory and nowhere near a courtroom. It also only matters in jurisdictions that take their own statutory hierarchy seriously. Some local bodies will simply ignore it and rule against you anyway. I've seen that happen in three separate cases across two states. When that happens, you have to escalate to a higher court, which means more time and money, and there is no guarantee of success.
Another thing nobody talks about: the paradox can work against you. If you're the one trying to enforce a regulation and the statute undermines it, you're the one who looks inconsistent. Todd's position was clean because he was the one pointing out the conflict from the outside. A government agency doing the same thing internally creates a whole different political dynamic. The practical takeaway is straightforward. If you're dealing with a situation where local rules contradict local law, map it out like Todd did. Don't argue the outcome. Argue the procedural impossibility. Find the escape valve in the documents — emergency exemptions, grandfather clauses, alternative filing paths. And be ready for the other side to just ignore the contradiction and rule anyway, because that happens more often than anyone wants to admit.
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