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Full-Text Articles in Law
Florida On Trial: Federalism In The 2000 Presidential Election, Jon L. Mills
Florida On Trial: Federalism In The 2000 Presidential Election, Jon L. Mills
Jon L. Mills
This article analyzes how Florida's state election laws operated during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. The intersection of law and politics in this controversy was critical. Political considerations affected decisions in both the Bush and Gore camps. The aftermath of the 2000 election found the federal government, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the State of Florida (among others) commissioning task forces and committees to investigate and suggest election reforms. Ultimately, the State of Florida passed significant election reform legislation. On May 10, 2001, Florida enacted sweeping election reform legislation entitled the Florida Election Reform Act of …
The Political Safeguards Of Horizontal Federalism, Heather K. Gerken, Ari Holtzblatt
The Political Safeguards Of Horizontal Federalism, Heather K. Gerken, Ari Holtzblatt
Michigan Law Review
For decades, we have debated whether “political safeguards” preserve healthy relations between the states and the federal government and thus reduce or eliminate the need for judges to referee state–federal tussles. No one has made such an argument about relations among the states, however, and the few scholars to have considered the question insist that such safeguards don’t exist. This Article takes the opposite view and lays down the intellectual foundations for the political safeguards of horizontal federalism. If you want to know what unites the burgeoning work on horizontal federalism and illuminates the hidden logic of its doctrine, you …
Campaign Finance, Federalism, And The Case Of The Long-Armed Donor, Todd E. Pettys
Campaign Finance, Federalism, And The Case Of The Long-Armed Donor, Todd E. Pettys
Todd E. Pettys
In its ruling last Term in McCutcheon v. FEC, the Court struck down federal campaign-finance laws that limited the aggregate amount of money that Shaun McCutcheon and other would-be campaign donors could give to a variety of political committees and to individuals running for Congress in states and districts other than their own. Chief Justice Roberts began his opinion for the plurality by declaring that "[t]here is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders." Retired justice John Paul Stevens has argued that the Court's ruling in McCutcheon is "a grossly …
Endogenous Decentralization In Federal Environmental Policies, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman, Leah G. Traub
Endogenous Decentralization In Federal Environmental Policies, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman, Leah G. Traub
All Faculty Scholarship
Under most federal environmental laws and some health and safety laws, states may apply for “primacy,” that is, authority to implement and enforce federal law, through a process known as “authorization.” Some observers fear that states use authorization to adopt more lax policies in a regulatory “race to the bottom.” This paper presents a simple model of the interaction between the federal and state governments in such a scheme of partial decentralization. Our model suggests that the authorization option may not only increase social welfare but also allow more stringent environmental regulations than would otherwise be feasible. Our model also …
Partisan Federalism, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Partisan Federalism, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Faculty Scholarship
Among the questions that vex the federalism literature are why states check the federal government and whether Americans identify with the states as well as the nation. This Article argues that partisanship supplies the core of an answer to both questions. Competition between today’s ideologically coherent, polarized parties leads state actors to make demands for autonomy, to enact laws rejected by the federal government, and to fight federal programs from within. States thus check the federal government by channeling partisan conflict through federalism’s institutional framework. Partisanship also recasts the longstanding debate about whether Americans identify with the states. Democratic and …
From Sovereignty And Process To Administration And Politics: The Afterlife Of American Federalism, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
From Sovereignty And Process To Administration And Politics: The Afterlife Of American Federalism, Jessica Bulman-Pozen
Faculty Scholarship
Announcing the death of dual federalism, Edward Corwin asked whether the states could be “saved as the vital cells that they have been heretofore of democratic sentiment, impulse, and action.” The federalism literature has largely answered in the affirmative. Unwilling to abandon dual federalism’s commitment to state autonomy and distinctive interests, scholars have proposed new channels for protecting these forms of state-federal separation. Yet today state and federal governance are more integrated than separate. States act as co-administrators and co-legislatures in federal statutory schemes; they carry out federal law alongside the executive branch and draft the law together with Congress. …
Public Lands And The Federal Government’S Compact-Based “Duty To Dispose”: A Case Study Of Utah’S H.B. 148 – The Transfer Of Public Lands Act, Donald J. Kochan
Public Lands And The Federal Government’S Compact-Based “Duty To Dispose”: A Case Study Of Utah’S H.B. 148 – The Transfer Of Public Lands Act, Donald J. Kochan
Donald J. Kochan
Recent legislation passed in March 2012 in the State of Utah — the “Transfer of Public Lands Act and Related Study,” (“TPLA”) also commonly referred to as House Bill 148 (“H.B. 148”) — has demanded that the federal government, by December 31, 2014, “extinguish title” to certain public lands that the federal government currently holds (totaling an estimated more than 20 million acres). It also calls for the transfer of such acreage to the State and establishes procedures for the development of a management regime for this increased state portfolio of land holdings resulting from the transfer. The State of …