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Interposition is a claimed right of a U.S. state to oppose actions of the federal government that the state deems unconstitutional. Under the theory of interposition, a state assumes the right to "interpose" itself between the federal government and the people of the state by taking action to prevent the federal government from enforcing laws that the state considers unconstitutional.
The Kentucky Resolution of 1799 added that when the states determine that a law is unconstitutional, nullification by the states is the proper remedy. The Virginia Resolutions of 1798 refer to "interposition" to express the idea that the states have a right to "interpose" to prevent harm caused by unconstitutional laws. The Virginia Resolutions ...
The related idea of interposition is a theory that a state has the right and the duty to "interpose" itself when the federal government enacts laws that the state believes to be unconstitutional. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison set forth the theories of nullification and interposition in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798.
(The other states, however, did not follow suit and several rejected the notion that states could nullify federal law.) According to this theory, the federal union is a voluntary association of states, and if the central government goes too far each state has the right to nullify that law. As Jefferson said in the Kentucky Resolutions:
Nullification, an outgrowth of Jeffersonian compact theory, held that any state, as part of its rights as sovereign parties to the Constitution, had the power to declare specific federal laws void within its borders if it considered the law to be unconstitutional. Therefore, under Calhoun's schema, a law required two forms of majorities: a ...
The independent state legislature theory or independent state legislature doctrine (ISL) is a judicially rejected legal theory that posits that the Constitution of the United States delegates authority to regulate federal elections within a state to that state's elected lawmakers without any checks and balances from state constitutions, state courts, governors, ballot initiatives, or other ...
The leading 19th-century commentary on the Constitution, Justice Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833), likewise rejected the compact theory and concluded that the Constitution was established directly by the people, not the states, and that it constitutes supreme law, not a mere compact.
Nullification (U.S. Constitution), a legal theory that a state has the right to nullify any federal law deemed unconstitutional with respect to the United States Constitution Nullification Crisis, the 1832 confrontation between the U.S. government and South Carolina over the latter's attempt to nullify a federal law