Law Commons^™

Direct Democracy In America, Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

The phrase "laboratories of democracy," as applied to the states, seems most often to mean something more like "democratic laboratories" - democratic testing grounds for various approaches to social problems. What sort of welfare reform will be most effective? Let Wisconsin try out Plan A, while Michigan experiments with Plan B. What combination of tort liability rules will achieve desired levels of compensation and deterrence? Let the states experiment with strict liability, comparative negligence, or various nofault schemes. It is also true, however, that the states are literally laboratories of democracy - arenas in which democratic institutions are themselves experimented …