Law Commons^™

Federalism And Social Change, Terrance Sandalow

Articles

A familiar passage in Professors Hart and Wechsler's casebook likens the relationship between federal and state law to that which exists between statutes and the common law. The underlying idea is that federal law rests upon a substructure of state law. "It builds upon legal relationships established by the states, altering or supplanting them only so far as necessary for [its] special purpose."' A similar relationship exists between state and federal judicial systems. State courts are courts of general jurisdiction, assumed to have authority to adjudicate controversies unless Congress has displaced them by conferring exclusive jurisdiction on federal courts. Federal …