Which plan contained the supremacy clause

Often referred to as the supremacy clause, this article says that when state law is in conflict with federal law, federal law must prevail. Because of the great number of federal and state laws, many of which deal with the same or similar topics, there have been many lawsuits claiming that state laws conflict with federal laws and are therefore invalid.

In these lawsuits, the Supreme Court generally looks at whether Congress has established a national regulatory scheme and if so, states cannot regulate in that area. The Court also looks at whether the state law directly interferes or is in conflict with federal law.

In all of these cases, the supremacy clause ensures that federal law takes priority over, or preempts, state law. Article VI also provides that both federal and state officials— including legislators and judges— must obey the U. Constitution state officials have a duty to obey their own state constitutions and laws as well.

Similarly, the fact that Congress has made the possession of certain drugs a federal crime does not prevent states from following a different policy as a matter of state law. While states are not in charge of whether drug possession is a federal crime, they are in charge of whether it is also a state crime. In these examples, though, the relevant state law does not interfere with the operation of the federal statute. Federal authorities can enforce the federal income tax or federal drug laws without regard to whether state law imposes a state income tax or criminalizes possession of the same drugs.

When application of state law would interfere with the operation of a valid federal statute, modern courts are more likely to conclude that the state law is preempted. Ever since Hines v. Davidowitz , the Supreme Court has sometimes articulated a broad version of this idea. I do not think that the Supremacy Clause itself compels this understanding of the preemptive effect of federal statutes. In any case where following some aspect of state law would require disregarding a legal directive validly supplied by a federal statute, judges should conclude that the state law is preempted; if judges have to choose between applying state law and applying a legal directive validly supplied by a federal statute, the Supremacy Clause gives priority to the federal law.

But unless state law contradicts federal law in this sense so that judges must choose which one to follow , nothing in the Supremacy Clause prevents judges from following both. When the Supremacy Clause was adopted, judges had long been using an analogous test to decide whether one law repeals another.

Ordinarily, statutes enacted by the same legislative body are cumulative: if a legislature enacts two statutes at different times, and if Statute 2 does not say that it repeals Statute 1, courts normally will apply both.

But that is not possible if the two statutes supply contradictory instructions for the same issue. With respect to statutes enacted by a single legislature, courts traditionally have handled such contradictions by giving priority to the more recent statute. With respect to conflicts between state and federal law, the Supremacy Clause establishes a different hierarchy: federal law wins regardless of the order of enactment. But this hierarchy matters only if the two laws do indeed contradict each other, such that applying one would require disregarding the other.

In my view, then, the trigger for preemption under the Supremacy Clause is identical to the traditional trigger for repeals.

In support of this conclusion, there is evidence that the Supremacy Clause was drafted and discussed in light of existing legal doctrines about repeals. That is a more contentious project than nonlawyers might assume. Federal statutes often are understood to imply some things that they do not say on their face, and legal directives that are established by implication can be just as valid as other legal directives.

Different judges, however, have different views about the circumstances in which courts can properly read things into federal statutes and, perhaps, about the extent to which courts can properly articulate subsidiary rules designed to help implement those statutes. If, as a matter of statutory interpretation, a particular federal statute implicitly forbids states to enact or enforce laws that would interfere with specified federal purposes, and if Congress has the constitutional power to impose this restriction on state law, then the Supremacy Clause would require courts to pay attention.

After all, if a federal statute validly strips states of the power to enact or enforce certain kinds of laws, a court that gave effect to such a state law would be disregarding a valid federal directive, in violation of the Supremacy Clause. Considered as a principle of statutory interpretation, then, the Hines formulation can co-exist with my understanding of the Supremacy Clause.

Still, the Hines formulation may not be a very good principle of statutory interpretation. To begin with, many textualists doubt that courts are in a good position to identify the full purposes and objectives behind any particular federal statute.

In any event, members of Congress would not necessarily want to run roughshod over all state laws that serve competing goals. To take a simple example, a federal statute that exempts multinational companies from certain federal taxes might have the purpose of luring business to the United States, but courts should not automatically infer that Congress is forbidding states to enforce their own generally applicable tax laws against such companies.

Likewise, a federal statute that gets rid of prior federal regulations in a particular area might be designed to reap the benefits of the free market, but courts should not automatically infer that Congress must have wanted to prevent individual states from enacting any regulations of their own in the same area. In the past few decades, the Supreme Court has become somewhat more sensitive to these points.

Meanwhile, Justice Thomas has rejected the Hines formulation entirely. At the very least, the Supremacy Clause does not itself require judges to conduct the analysis described in Hines and its progeny.

In my view, that analysis is appropriate only to the extent that individual federal statutes are properly interpreted to call for it. Some of the arguments presented here initially appeared in Preemption , 86 Virginia Law Review Which comes first, the nation or the states?

Who is the ultimate sovereign in our American system—a national people represented by the federal government, or the several states considered as distinct political entities? This is perhaps the most basic question about the U. Constitution and the system it created. The relationship between the states and the federal government is one of the most fundamental fault lines of constitutional theory.

In many of its aspects, the relationship is deeply contested, and no settled answer exists. There are two very different ways of understanding America. The nationalist vision imagines a single national people—We the People—coming together to create a government that represents all of them and is superior to—in a real sense, more American than—the individual states.

The federalist vision imagines states delegating some of their powers to a federal government created to act as their agent in certain matters. Some of the questions thrown up by the tension between these two visions have been resolved. It is settled now that the U. Supreme Court has the power to reverse the decisions of state supreme courts in appropriate cases, and that state courts must accept U. Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution and federal law. It is settled that states cannot nullify federal laws—though constitutional amendments giving them such power have been proposed.

In other areas of law, though, the struggle persists. In these areas, and others, the two visions continue to clash. Each can point to some support in the revered figures of history and our founding documents. Abraham Lincoln, in the Gettysburg address, dated the birth of the nation to and the Declaration of Independence, not and the Constitution. But was Lincoln right? It is true that the states acted collectively through a Congress before independence, but the Declaration of Independence talks of States taking their rightful place in the world, not of a single nation.

The Constitution, likewise, tantalizes the supporters of each vision. History gives us an answer of a sort. It shows a consistent flow of power from the states to the federal government—episodically, and typically in the face of at least temporary resistance by the Supreme Court, but consistently. This happens as a result of constitutional amendments—most notably the Reconstruction Amendments the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth , which both granted the federal government new powers and imposed new limits on the states, but also the Progressive-era amendments the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth.