Law Commons^™

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 …

Reanimating The Foreign Compacts Clause, Thomas Liefke Eaton

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

On October 23, 2019, the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) filed a complaint against the State of California “for unlawfully entering a cap and trade agreement with the Canadian Providence of Quebec.” In many ways, the complaint reflects a conventional disagreement between states and the federal government over the contours of federalism, but the complaint’s second cause of action, alleging a violation of the “Compacts Clause,” Article I, section 10(3) of the United States Constitution, is unique. The body of law and scholarship surrounding the Compacts Clause is often guesswork at best, for jurists and scholars alike, because typically …