Federalism And The Tug Of War Within

As environmental, national security, and technological challenges push American law into ever more inter-jurisdictional territory, this book proposes a model of 'Balanced Federalism' that mediates between competing federalism values and provides greater guidance for regulatory decision-making.

This essay is drawn from a lecture for the “Ways of Federalism” conference (University of the Basque Country, October 19, 2011) and a new book, "Federalism and the Tug of War Within" (Oxford, 2012) (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1991612), which explores how constitutional interpreters struggle to reconcile the core tensions within American federalism. The essay reviews the current challenges of the American federal system through the theoretical lens developed in the book, focusing on the role of state-federal bargaining within the U.S. federal system. It appears as a chapter in a book of selected conference proceedings, The Ways of Federalism in Western Countries and the Horizons of Territorial Autonomy in Spain (Springer, 2013). "Federalism and the Tug of War Within" traces American federalism's internal struggle through history and into the present, critiquing the Rehnquist Court and Tea Party's embrace of greater jurisdictional separation, the limits of New Federalism and Cooperative Federalism approaches, and the growing disjuncture between federalism theory and practice in the United States. In response to the ongoing challenges for American federalism posed by constitutional design, the book outlines a theory of Balanced Federalism, which mediates the core tensions of American federalism on three separate planes: (1) fostering balance among the competing federalism values, (2) leveraging the functional capacities of all three branches of government in interpreting federalism, and (3) maximizing the wisdom of both state and federal actors in so doing. The essay introduces the book's overarching themes and explores one part of it in detail -- the role of well-crafted intergovernmental bargaining in helping to navigate these core tensions.

This month, the Supreme Court will decide what some believe will be among the most important cases in the history of the institution. In the 'Obamacare' cases, the Court considers whether the Affordable Care Act ('ACA') exceeds the boundaries of federal authority under the various provisions of the Constitution that establish the relationship between local and national governance. Its response will determine the fate of Congress's efforts to grapple with the nation's health care crisis, and perhaps other legislative responses to wicked regulatory problems like climate governance or education policy. Whichever way the gavel falls, the decisions will likely impact the upcoming presidential and congressional elections, and some argue that they may significantly alter public faith in the Court itself. But from the constitutional perspective, they are important because they will speak directly to the interpretive problems of federalism that have ensnared the architects, practitioners, and scholars of American governance since the nation's first days. This very short essay explains the battle over Obamacare in terms of the classic American federalism debates, and proposes a better way of analyzing this and all federalism issues, drawing from a new book. (Different versions of this essay were cross-posted to RegBlog, the American Constitution Society Blog, and the Environmental Law Profs Blog on June 21, 2012.).

The intensity of federalism disputes reflects inexorable pressure on all levels of government to meet the increasingly complicated challenges of governance in an ever more interconnected world. Yet even as federalism dilemmas continue to erupt all from all corners, environmental law remains at the forefront of controversy. This chapter argues that environmental law is uniquely prone to federalism discord because it inevitably confronts the core question with which federalism grapples -- who gets to decide? -- in contexts where state and federal claims to power are simultaneously at their strongest. Environmental problems tend to match the need to regulate the harmful use of specific lands (among the most sacred of local prerogatives) with the need to regulate border-crossing harms caused by these uses (among the strongest of national prerogatives). As a result, it is often impossible to solve the problem without engaging authority on both ends of the spectrum -- and disputes erupt when local and national ideas on how best to proceed diverge. Ongoing jurisdictional controversies in energy policy, pollution law, and natural resource management reveal environmental law as the canary in federalism's coal mine, showcasing the underlying reasons for jurisdictional conflict in all areas of law. Concluding the book, this chapter explores why environmental law regularly raises such thorny questions of federalism, and how environmental law has adapted structurally to manage federalism conflicts. Drawing from the theoretical framework that I introduced in FEDERALISM AND THE TUG OF WAR WITHIN (Oxford, 2012: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1991612), Part II reviews the central objectives of federalism, examining the conflicting values they imply and the resulting tension that suffuses all federalism-sensitive governance. Part III evaluates why federalism conflicts are heightened in the context of environmental law. Divisiveness not only reflects the intense competition among federalism values in environmental governance, it also provides key insights into the core theoretical dilemmas of jurisdictional overlap more generally. Part IV probes how environmental law has adapted to manage the challenges of overlap by asymmetrically allocating local, state, and federal authority within various models of collaborative or coordinated governance. Part V concludes with consideration of what the larger discourse can learn from the dynamic federalism and multiscalar governance innovations emerging from within environmental governance. Through processes that engage stakeholders at all levels of jurisdictional scale, environmental federalism is lighting a path away from the old “zero-sum” model of federalism (which treats every assertion of authority at one jurisdictional level as a loss of authority for the others), and toward a model of negotiated federalism emphasizing consultation, compromise, and coordination.

The Supreme Court is a tiny institution that can resolve only a fraction of the constitutional issues generated by the American government. This simple yet startling fact is impossible to deny, but few students of the Court have seriously considered its implications. In Rationing the Constitution, Andrew Coan explains how the Court's limited capacity shapes U.S. constitutional law and argues that the limits of judicial capacity powerfully constrain Supreme Court decision-making on many of the most important constitutional questions, spanning federalism, separation of powers, and individual rights. Examples include the commerce power, presidential powers, Equal Protection, and regulatory takings. The implications for U.S. constitutional law are profound. Lawyers, academics, and social activists pursuing social reform through the courts must consider whether their goals can be accomplished within the constraints of judicial capacity.--

Federal models of government have shaped history and demonstrated how diverse people can live together and govern together in relative harmony. The Forum of Federations Handbook of Federal Countries 2020 builds on the previous 2005 edition and offers a much-needed update to this signature resource in comparative federalism. Outlining every federal country in the world, each chapter provides a brief yet comprehensive overview of the history of federalism in its specific country, the constitutional nature of federalism, and recent historical dynamics. As new countries have joined the Federal ranks, this handbook brings readers up to speed offering an authoritative look at both the older federal countries as well as new federal countries like Nepal. The Forum of Federations Handbook of Federal Countries 2020 is an essential resource for academics, researchers, university students, libraries, history and governance teachers, politicians and civil servants, and casual observers of federalism.

Countless instances of intergovernmental bargaining offer a means of understanding the relationship between state and federal power that differs from the stylized model of “zero-sum” federalism that has come to dominate political discourse. The zero-sum model sees winner-takes-all jurisdictional competition between the federal and state governments for power, emphasizing sovereign antagonism within the federal system. Yet real-world interjurisdictional governance show that the boundary between state and federal authority is really an ongoing project of negotiation, taking place on levels both large and small. Reconceptualizing the relationship between state and federal power as one heavily mediated by negotiation reveals just how far federalism practice has departed from the zero-sum rhetoric. Better still, it offers hope for moving beyond the more paralyzing features of the federalism discourse, and toward the kinds of good governance that Americans of all political stripes hope for.This invited short essay, drawing from previously published work in Federalism and the Tug of War Within (Oxford, 2012) (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1991612), and Negotiating Federalism, 52 B.C. L. Rev. 1 (2011) (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1583132), appears in an issue of Administrative and Regulatory Law (Vol. 38, No. 1) devoted to discussion of the Spending Power after the Supreme Court's 2012 review of the Affordable Care Act. The essay explores various ways that state and federal actors negotiate within regulatory arenas of jurisdictional overlap, and includes an inset piece analyzing the effects of the Supreme Court's decision on spending power bargaining.

Over the past two decades Global Legal Pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the 21st century. Wherever one looks, there is conflict among multiple legal regimes. Some of these regimes are state-based, some are built and maintained by non-state actors, some fall within the purview of local authorities and jurisdictional entities, and some involve international courts, tribunals, and arbitral bodies, and regulatory organizations. Global Legal Pluralism has provided, first and foremost, a set of useful analytical tools for describing this conflict among legal and quasi-legal systems. At the same time, some pluralists have also ventured in a more normative direction, suggesting that legal systems might sometimes purposely create legal procedures, institutions, and practices that encourage interaction among multiple communities. These scholars argue that pluralist approaches can help foster more shared participation in the practices of law, more dialogue across difference, and more respect for diversity without requiring assimilation and uniformity. Despite the veritable explosion of scholarly work on legal pluralism, conflicts of law, soft law, global constitutionalism, the relationships among relative authorities, transnational migration, and the fragmentation and reinforcement of territorial boundaries, no single work has sought to bring together these various scholarly strands, place them into dialogue with each other, or connect them with the foundational legal pluralism research produced by historians, anthropologists, and political theorists. Paul Schiff Berman, one of the world's leading theorists of Global Legal Pluralism, has gathered over 40 diverse authors from multiple countries and multiple scholarly disciplines to touch on nearly every area of legal pluralism research, offering defenses, critiques, and applications of legal pluralism to 21st-century legal analysis. Berman also provides introductions to every part of the book, helping to frame the various approaches and perspectives. The result is the first comprehensive review of Global Legal Pluralism scholarship ever produced. This book will be a must-have for scholars and students seeking to understand the insights of legal pluralism to contemporary debates about law. At the same time, this volume will help energize and engage the field of Global Legal Pluralism and push this scholarly trajectory forward into another two decades of innovation.

How should we strike a balance between the benefits of centralized and local governance, and how important is context to selecting the right policy tools? This uniquely broad overview of the field illuminates our understanding of environmental federalism and informs our policy-making future. Professor Kalyani Robbins has brought together an impressive team of leading environmental federalism scholars to provide a collection of chapters, each focused on a different regime. This review of many varied approaches, including substantial theoretical material, culminates in a comparative analysis of environmental federalism and consideration of what each system might learn from the others. The Law and Policy of Environmental Federalism includes clear descriptive portions that make it a valuable teaching resource, as well as original theory and a depth of policy analysis that will benefit scholars of federalism or environmental and natural resources law. The value of its analysis for real-world decision-making will make it a compelling read for practitioners in environmental law or fields concerned with federalism issues, including those in government or NGOs, as well as lobbyists.

Territorial autonomy in Spain has reached a crossroads. After over thirty years of development, the consensus regarding its appropriateness has started to crumble. The transformation project embodied by the reform of Statute of Catalonia (2006) has failed to achieve its most significant demands. Although the concept of Spain as a Federation is disputed -more within the country than beyond-, the evolution of the Spanish system needs to follow a markedly federalist path. In this perspective, reference models assume critical importance. This edition gathers the works of a broad group of European, American and Spanish experts who analyse the present-day challenges of their respective systems. The objective, thus, is to contribute ideas which might help to address the evolution of the Spanish system in the light of the experience of more established Federations. This first volume analyses the challenges facing federal systems in the age of globalisation from a global perspective. It also addresses current questions and the challenges faced today by, in the sphere of the internal division of powers, the most significant ‘western’ federal systems, on the one hand, and the Spanish system of territorial autonomy, on the other.