Question: I am designing a contact management system and have come across an interesting issue regarding modeling geographic locations in a consistent way. I would like to be able to record locations associated with a particular person (mailing address(es) for work, school, home, etc.) My thought is to create a table of locales such as the following:

**Locales (ID, LocationName, ParentID)** where autonomous locations (such as countries, e.g. USA) are parents of themselves. This way I can have an arbitrarily deep nesting of 'political units' (COUNTRY > STATE > CITY or COUNTRY > STATE > CITY > UNIVERSITY). Some queries will necessarily involve recursion.

I would appreciate any other recommendations or perhaps advice regarding predictable issues that I am likely to encounter with such a scheme.

Answer: 
I think you might be overthinking this. There's a reason most systems just store addresses and maybe a table of countries. Here are some things to look out for:

1. Would an address in the Bronx include the borough as a level in the hierarchy? Would an address in an unincorporated area eliminate the "city" level of the hierarchy? How do you model an address within a university vs an address that's not within one? You'll end up with a ragged hierarchy which will force you to traverse the tree every time you need to display an address in your application. If you have an "address book" page the performance hit could be significant.
2. I'm not sure that you even have just one hierarchy. Brown University has facilities in Providence, RI and Bristol, RI. The only clean solution would be to have a double hierarchy with two campuses that each belong to their respective cities in one hierarchy but that both belong to Brown University on the other hierarchy. (A university is fundamentally unlike a political region. You shouldn't really mix them.)
3. What about zip codes? Some zip codes encompass multiple towns, other times a city is broken into multiple zip codes. And (rarely) some zip codes even cross state lines. (According to Wikipedia, at least...)
4. How will you enter the data? Building out the database by parsing conventionally-formatted addresses can be difficult when you take into account vanity addresses, alternate names for certain streets, different international formats, etc. And I think that entering every address hierarchically would be a PITA.
5. It sounds like you're trying to model the entire world in your application. Do you really want or need to maintain a table that could conceivable contain every city, state, province, postal code, and country in the world? (Or at least every one where you know somebody?) The only thing I can think of that this scheme would buy you is proximity, but if that's what you want I'd just store state and country separately (and maybe the zip code) and add latitude and longitude data from Google.

Sorry for the extreme pessimism, but I've gone down that road myself. It's logically beautiful and elegant, but it doesn't work so well in practice.
For Geographic locations you may wish to resolve an address to a Latitude, Longitude array (perhaps using Google maps etc.) to calculate proximities etc.. For Geopolitical nesting ... I'd go with the KISS response. 

If you really want to model it, perhaps you need the types to be more generic ... Country -> State -> County -> Borough -> Locality -> City -> Suburb -> Street or PO Box -> Number -> -> Appartment etc. -> Institution (University or Employer) -> Division -> Subdivision-1 -> subdivision-n ... Are you sure you can't do KISS?