Law Commons^™

Reconstructing State Republics, Francesca L. Procaccini

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Our national political dysfunction is rooted in constitutionally dysfunctional states. States today are devolving into modern aristocracies through laws that depress popular control, entwine wealth and power, and insulate incumbents from democratic oversight and accountability. These unrepublican states corrupt the entire United States. It is for this reason that the Constitution obligates the United States to restore ailing states to their full republican strength. But how? For all its attention to process, the Constitution is silent on how the United States may exercise its sweeping Article IV power to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of …

Federalism And The Military Power Of The United States, Robert Leider

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Article examines the original meaning of the constitutional provisions governing the raising and organization of military forces. It argues that the Framers carefully divided the military between the federal and state governments. This division provided structural checks against the misuse of military power and made it more difficult to use offensive military force. These structural checks have been compromised by the creation of the U.S. Army Reserve, the dual enlistment of National Guard officers and soldiers, and the acceptance of conscription into the national army, all of which have enhanced federal military power beyond its original constitutional limits.

This …

Standing For Nothing, Robert Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A growing number of courts and commentators have suggested that states have Article III standing to protect state law. Proponents of such "protective" standing argue that states must be given access to federal court whenever their laws are threatened. Absent such access, they claim, many state laws might prove toothless, thereby undermining the value of the states in our federal system. Furthermore, proponents insist that this form of special solicitude is very limited-that it opens the doors to the federal courthouses a crack but does not swing them wide open. This Essay, however, contests both of these claims, and thus, …

Making Preemption Less Palatable: State Poison Pill Legislation, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Congressional preemption constitutes perhaps the single greatest threat to state power and to the values served thereby. Given the structural incentives now in place, there is little to deter Congress from preempting state law, even when the state interests Congress displaces far exceed its own. The threat of preemption has raised alarms across the political spectrum, but no one has yet devised a satisfactory way to balance state and federal interests in preemption disputes. This Article devises a novel solution: state poison pill legislation. Borrowing a page from corporate law, poison pill legislation would enable the states to make preemption …

Dynamic Incorporation Of Federal Law, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article provides a comprehensive analysis of state constitutional limits on legislative incorporation of dynamic federal law, as occurs when a state legislature incorporates future federal tax, environmental or health laws. Many state judicial decisions draw on the nondelegation doctrine to endorse an ex ante prohibition on state legislative incorporation of dynamic federal law. However, the analysis in this Article shows how bedrock principles related to separation of powers under state constitutions, such as protecting transparency, reinforcing accountability, and protecting against arbitrariness in lawmaking, are not consistent with this approach. Instead, this Article highlights two practices that can make dynamic …

Can The States Keep Secrets From The Federal Government?, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

States amass troves of information detailing the regulated activities of their citizens, including activities that violate federal law. Not surprisingly, the federal government is keenly interested in this information. It has ordered reluctant state officials to turn over their confidential files concerning medical marijuana, juvenile criminal history, immigration status, tax payments, and employment discrimination, among many other matters, to help enforce federal laws against private citizens. Many states have objected to these demands, citing opposition to federal policies and concerns about the costs of breaching confidences, but the lower courts have uniformly upheld the federal government’s power to commandeer information …

On The Limits Of Supremacy: Medical Marijuana And The States' Overlooked Power To Legalize Federal Crime, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Using the conflict over medical marijuana as a timely case study, this Article explores the overlooked and underappreciated power of states to legalize conduct Congress bans. Though Congress has banned marijuana outright, and though that ban has survived constitutional scrutiny, state laws legalizing medical use of marijuana constitute the de facto governing law in thirteen states. This Article argues that these state laws and (most) related regulations have not been, and, more interestingly, cannot be preempted by Congress, given constraints imposed on Congress's preemption power by the anti-commandeering rule, properly understood. Just as importantly, these state laws matter, in a …

The Constitutional Dimension Of Immigration Federalism, Clare Huntington

Vanderbilt Law Review

In Farmers Branch, Texas, the city council enacted a measure to fine landlords who rent their premises to unauthorized migrants,' and in Arizona, the state legislature passed a law imposing stiff penalties on employers who intentionally or knowingly hire unauthorized migrants. In San Francisco, the board of supervisors passed a measure that bars law enforcement officers from inquiring into the immigration status of an individual in the course of a criminal investigation. In Alabama and Florida, state officials have entered into agreements with the federal government permitting state law enforcement officers to arrest and detain non-citizens on immigration charges. Other …

Constitutional Isolationism And The Limits Of State Separation Of Powers As A Barrier To Interstate Compacts, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this Essay, I address the question of which branch of state government ought to have the authority to negotiate interstate compacts - a question of state separation of powers. Recent case law interpreting state constitutions in the context of Indian gambling compacts provides a particularly fertile ground for exploring this question, as it illustrates how courts are struggling to find a way to allow state executive officials greater autonomy to negotiate interstate compacts. Part I illustrates how traditional notions of separation of powers under state constitutions can be understood to pose a barrier to executive branch negotiation of interstate …

The Populist Safeguards Of Federalism, Robert A. Mikos

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Extant legal scholarship often portrays citizens as the catalysts of federalization. Scholars say that citizens pressure Congress to impose their morals on people living in other states, to trump home-state laws with which they disagree, or to shift the costs of regulatory programs onto out-of-state taxpayers, all to the demise of states' rights. Since Congress (usually) gives citizens what they want, scholars insist the courts must step in to protect states from federal encroachments. By contrast, this Article proposes a new theory of the populist safeguards of federalism. It develops two distinct but mutually reinforcing reasons why populist demands on …

Commandeering And Its Alternatives: A Federalism Perspective, Neil S. Siegel

Vanderbilt Law Review

This inquiry argues that current Tenth Amendment jurisprudence causes net harm to federalism values under certain circumstances. Specifically, New York v. United States and Printz v. United States protect state autonomy to some extent by requiring the federal government to internalize more of the costs of federal regulation before engaging in regulation. But anticommandeering doctrine harms state autonomy in situations where the presence of the rule triggers more preemption going forward. Preemption generally causes a greater compromise of federalism values than does commandeering by eroding state regulatory control.

While it is a context-sensitive empirical question whether specific applications of the …

The Puzzle Of State Constitutions, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In a series of groundbreaking articles published over the past fifteen years, James Gardner has led the charge to make state constitutionalism a part of the constitutional law discussion more generally. His new book, Interpreting State Constitutions: A Jurisprudence of Function in a Federal System, steps beyond his study of specific issues in state constitutionalism to lay out an ambitious theory about how state constitutions should be interpreted based on their function within a federal system. Gardner's book is a significant scholarly effort to take state constitutions seriously, in a way that transcends any one jurisdiction or constitutional provision. Gardner's …

Political Bargaining And Judicial Intervention In Constitutional And Antitrust Federalism, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Federal judicial deference to state and local regulation is at the center of contentious debates regarding the implementation of competition policy. This Article invokes a political process bargaining framework to develop a principled approach for addressing the appropriate level of judicial intervention under the dormant commerce clause and state action immunity from antitrust enforcement. Using illustrations from network industries, it is argued that, at core, these two independent doctrines share a common concern with political (not only market) failure by focusing on the incentives faced by powerful stakeholders in state and local lawmaking. More important, they share the common purpose …

Dual Constitutions And Constitutional Duels: Separation Of Powers And State Implementation Of Federally Inspired Regulatory Programs And Standards, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Frequently, state-wide executive agencies and localities attempt to implement federally-inspired programs. Two predominant examples are cooperative federalism programs and incorporation of federal standards in state-specific law. Federally-inspired programs can bump into state constitutional restrictions on the allocation of powers, especially in states whose constitutional systems embrace stronger prohibitions on legislative delegation than the weak restrictions at the federal level, where national goals and standards are made. This Article addresses this tension between dual federal/state normative accounts of the constitutional allocation of powers in state implementation of federally-inspired programs. To the extent the predominant ways of resolving the tension come from …

Time For A New Approach? Federalism And Foreign Affairs After "Crosby V. National Foreign Trade Council", James J. Pascoe

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

On June 19, 2000, in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council--a much-anticipated decision involving the intersection of federalism and foreign relations--the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts law restricting state purchases from companies doing business in Burma. Crosby represents the Court's first consideration not only of local selective purchasing laws but, more importantly, its first consideration of the sort of subnational sanctions first developed by state and local governments during the anti-apartheid campaign of the 1980's. Thus, Crosby may pose an obstacle to human rights activism by local governments using economic sanctions to punish perceived human-rights offenders.

Because the …

Institutional Design And The Lingering Legacy Of Antifederalist Separation Of Powers Ideals In The States, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article applies comparative institutional analysis to separation of powers under state constitutions, with a particular focus on the nondelegation doctrine and states' acceptance of Chadha-like restrictions on legislative oversight. The Article begins by contrasting state and federal doctrine and enforcement levels in each of these separation of powers contexts. Most state courts, unlike their federal counterparts, adhere to a strong nondelegation doctrine. In addition, many states accept (de facto if not de jure) even more explicit and sweeping legislative vetoes than the federal system. The Article highlights the contrast of federal and state approaches by identifying their similarity with …

Five Views Of Federalism: "Converse-1983" In Context, Akhil R. Amar

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1987, I published an overly long article in the Yale Law Journal entitled Of Sovereignty and Federalism. In it, I advanced a "converse-1983" model of federalism-a model that highlighted the ways in which state laws can provide remedies when federal officials violate federal constitutional rights. For example, prior to the 1971 landmark of Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Agents, citizens whose Fourth Amendment rights had been violated by federal officers had no clear federal cause of action; but state trespass law often provided a remedy, and enabled citizens to recover when their "persons, houses, papers, [or] effects" had been …

Three Faces Of Federalism: Finding A Formula For The Future, Deborah J. Merritt

Vanderbilt Law Review

The first, and oldest, of the Supreme Court's concepts of federalism is the territorial model. This model recognizes that there is a discernible boundary between the subjects fit for national regulation and those reserved for state governance. Territorialists argue that the national government is supreme in some areas, while states reign sovereign in others. Adherents of this model, for example, might declare that the national government directs foreign affairs while the states control domestic relations.

Under the territorial model, federalism violations occur when the national government attempts to invade a substantive area of law reserved to the states. The Supreme …

Federalism, Separation Of Powers, And Individual Liberties, Dennis G. Lagory

Vanderbilt Law Review

In a world that the Framers hardly could have anticipated, the Constitution remains a singularly effective instrument for the pres- ervation of individual liberty. In its allocation of power between the states and the federal government, it provides Americans with multiple champions of their rights--the federal government, which protects a liberty that is constantly evolving to adapt traditional values to new realities, and the state governments, which protect the basic liberties to which mankind has always been entitled. In its allocation of power between the branches of the federal government, the Constitution provides us with a polity possessing powers adequate …

State Adoption Of Federal Law: Exploring The Limits Of Florida's "Forced Linkage" Amendment, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This article examines the "forced linkage" between state and federal provisions that the 1983 amendment establishes in Florida. It concludes that forced linkage is ill-conceived, because it is inimical to state court independence. Accordingly, this article argues, the 1983 amendment to article I, section 12 of the Florida Constitution should be repealed. If not repealed, it should be interpreted to permit Florida courts broad discretion in developing their own stance on search and seizure law. So construed, the amendment would only require Florida courts to abide by those United States Supreme Court opinions that provide (1) an authoritative holding that …

The Constitutionality Of Statutes Of Repose: Federalism Reigns, Josephine H. Hicks

Vanderbilt Law Review

The development of common-law tort liability, especially since the late 1950s and early 1960s, has broken many of the barriers to plaintiff recovery. The abrogation of the privity requirement, the evolution of the discovery rule, and the advent of strict liability were primary agents in this "assault upon the citadel."' These developments have threatened many potential tort defendants, particularly members of the manufacturing and construction industries and the medical profession. In response to lobbying pressure from these groups, many state legislatures have adopted measures to limit tort recoveries. One of the measures most popular among defendants has been the enactment …

Some Intersections Of The Negative Commerce Clause And The New Federalism, James F. Blumstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

Much has been written about the change in the Supreme Court's judicial philosophy, as a new, ascendant majority has been able successfully to implement its emerging notions of judicial reticence and self-abnegation. This fundamental turnabout in judicial perspective is hardly coincidental, since it reflects the fulfillment of an oft-repeated campaign pledge of Richard Nixon, who in 1968 promised, if elected, to appoint so-called strict constructionists to the Court.' In a basic way his appointees have succeeded in modifying the activist stance that prevailed on the Court during much of the tenure of Earl Warren as Chief Justice. With notable exceptions …

Motor Carrier Regulation--An Adventure In Federalism, Val Sanford

Vanderbilt Law Review

By virtue of the nature of our federal system every attempt to regulate extensive economic activity involves constantly recurring problems as to the proper allocation of governmental power between the state and national governments, and thus problems as to the proper balancing of local or state and national interests. The development of motor carrier regulation in the United States has been controlled by the general concepts of federalism and exemplifies the nature of the basic problems inherent in those concepts. The purpose of this article is to examine the regulation of motor carriers from the standpoint of the allocation of …

Crosskey's Constitution: An Archeological Blueprint, Howard J. Graham

Vanderbilt Law Review

Could it be fortunate that so much of history is a closed, or at least a forbidden, book? Otherwise might we not squander our resources reliving and refighting the past? The present soon would be unendurable, the future an endless remarshalling yard for causes stretching back to antiquity.

If the first volumes of Professor Crosskey's study invite this somber opening reflection, it is not that his achievement is unimpressive. Here, undeniably, is a work in the great tradition of controversial writing. Few lawyers and certainly fewer historians--ever willingly have assumed greater burdens of proof. Yet fewer still have contrived a …