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A State Within A State: Re-Examining The Federal Lands Question And Its Effect On State Sovereignty, David Wilde
A State Within A State: Re-Examining The Federal Lands Question And Its Effect On State Sovereignty, David Wilde
William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review
Though the path of the public lands debate is well-trodden, this Note will seek to answer the question in novel ways. First, it uses the Corpus of Founding Era American English to perform an objective linguistic analysis of the phrase “dispose of” in the Property Clause. Through this analysis, it appears that an ordinary person at the time the Constitution was adopted would most likely have read the phrase “dispose of” in the Property Clause to mean sell, give away, bestow, or put into another’s hand or power.
Next, this Note investigates the historical and philosophical understandings of state sovereignty …
Environmental Federalism As Forum Shopping, Cale Jaffe
Environmental Federalism As Forum Shopping, Cale Jaffe
William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review
Public policy advocates of all stripes—litigators, politicians, or newspaper columnists—invoke principles of federalism when they are imploring Congress to respect limits imposed by Article I, and when they are insisting that a state legislature accede to the supremacy of a duly enacted national law, invoking Article VI. Yet historically, application of the term, “federalism,” at least in the context of environmental law, has been driven far more by pragmatic considerations than constitutional ones.
This pragmatic approach should not be surprising because, at its core, federalism simply asks what is the right level of government to solve a given problem. After …