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Tag: Federalism

Washington and Lee Law Review - Federalism

Article

by Ray Worthy Campbell

State sovereignty, once seemingly sidelined in personal jurisdiction analysis, has returned with a vengeance. Driven by the idea that states must not offend rival states in their jurisdictional reach, some justices have looked for specific targeting of individual states as individual states by the defendant in order to justify an assertion of personal jurisdiction. To allow cases to proceed based on national targeting alone, they argue, would diminish the sovereignty of any state that the defendant had specifically targeted.

This Article looks for the first time at how this emphasis on state sovereignty limits national sovereignty, especially where alien defendants are involved. By requiring an antecedent “top of mind” focus on the forum state when actions that lead to litigation are taken, the Court would exclude from U.S. litigation activities that bear a close relationship to the forum and that would provide a basis for jurisdiction in many, if not most, other nations. This matters especially because the U.S. conducts so much of its national regulation through litigation in state courts and through litigation based on state causes of action. This Article gives fresh emphasis to the notion that states are members of a shared sovereignty, and that state actions implicate national sovereignty as much as actions by the federal branch of government.

The problem is compounded by the incoherency of the Court’s “our federalism” state sovereignty analysis. Other commentators have not focused on how the Court’s assumption in recent personal jurisdiction cases that states are in purely rivalrous relationships contrasts with reality, which is increasingly recognized to involve overlapping, reinforcing, sometimes coordinated spheres of jurisdiction. Rather than treating the states as rivals involved in a zero-sum game, where an assertion of power by one undercuts the power and dignity of another, this Article looks at the polycentric, pluralistic nature of U.S. governance, where state members of a “more perfect union” coordinate, collaborate, pursue shared goals independently, and only sometimes compete.

State sovereignty ultimately is national sovereignty. To exaggerate concepts of state rivalry and exclusiveness in a modern age of legal pluralism serves only to diminish the regulatory reach of individual states, and, ultimately, the nation as a whole. The Court’s narrow focus on sovereignty threatens to make the scope of U.S. jurisdiction far narrower than that of other nations, and by Constitutionalizing that scope to make adjustments in rapidly changing circumstances difficult.

Article

by David S. Rubenstein

Federal agencies are key players in our federalist system: they make front-line decisions about the scope of federal policy and whether such policy should preempt state law. How agencies perform these functions, and how they might fulfill them better, are questions at the heart of “administrative federalism.” Some academic proposals for administrative federalism work to enhance states’ ability to participate in federal agency decisionmaking. Other proposals work to protect state autonomy through adjustments to the Supreme Court’s administrative preemption doctrine. As jurists and scholars debate what these proposals entail for federalism, this Article doubles-down with a twist: it examines what these same proposals can do for separation of powers.

As uncovered here, adjustments to the administrative system—although made in federalism’s name—will derivatively affect how national law is made and checked along the separation-of-powers dimension. Moreover, as shown here, federalism-inspired proposals for the administrative system may require a tradeoff in constitutional values. Pushed to decide, we might choose federalism over separation of powers, or vice versa. This Article informs that choice by comparing and contrasting what administrative federalism’s major proposals entail for federalism and separation of powers, simultaneously.

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