Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In the United States, federalism is the constitutional division of power between U.S. state governments and the federal government of the United States. Since the founding of the country, and particularly with the end of the American Civil War, power shifted away from the states and toward the national government.
Dual federalism, also known as layer-cake federalism or divided sovereignty, is a political arrangement in which power is divided between the federal and state governments in clearly defined terms, with state governments exercising those powers accorded to them without interference from the federal government.
National Foreign Trade Council, 530 U.S. 363 (2000), that even when a state law is not in direct conflict with a federal law, the state law could still be found unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause if the "state law is an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of Congress's full purposes and objectives". [30]
In United States v. Lopez (1995), [29] a federal law mandating a "gun-free zone" on and around public school campuses was struck down. The Supreme Court ruled that there was no clause in the Constitution authorizing the federal law. This was the first modern Supreme Court opinion to limit the government's power under the Commerce Clause.
Concurrent powers makes it so that both federal and state governments can create laws, deal with environmental protection, maintain national parks and prisons, and provide a police force. The judicial branch of government holds powers as well. They have the ability to use express and concurrent powers to make laws and establish regulations.
Concurrent powers are contrasted with reserved powers (not possessed by the federal government) and with exclusive federal powers (forbidden to be possessed by the states, or requiring federal permission). [1] In many federations, enumerated federal powers are supreme and so, they may pre-empt a state or provincial law in case of conflict.
Federal jurisdiction refers to the legal scope of the government's powers in the United States of America.. The United States is a federal republic, governed by the U.S. Constitution, containing fifty states and a federal district which elect the President and Vice President, and having other territories and possessions in its national jurisdiction.
Early in its history, in Marbury v.Madison (1803) and Fletcher v. Peck (1810), the Supreme Court of the United States declared that the judicial power granted to it by Article III of the United States Constitution included the power of judicial review, to consider challenges to the constitutionality of a State or Federal law.