The Tenth Amendment and Local Government
2003; The Yale Law Journal Company; Volume: 112; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3657506
ISSN1939-8611
Autores Tópico(s)Legal and Constitutional Studies
ResumoIt is no historical accident that the "town meeting" is the dominant political metaphor of our American republic.Since the earliest settlers arrived in the New World, towns and cities have been a wellspring of popular sovereignty and civic republicanism.It is a strikingly odd textual fact, then, that localities receive no mention in the Constitution.The document does not specifically define the role that towns and cities play in the constitutional regime, nor does it explicitly preserve a sphere for local autonomy.Given this omission, Supreme Court doctrine and modem scholarship on local government articulate-or at least accept-the following principle: Localities possess no constitutional personality.Local government theorist David Barron's recent meditation on the linkages between local, state, and federal jurisdictions largely reflects the conventional wisdom, at least with regard to this specific legal formality.'Barron criticizes the Court's emphasis on federalism from a localist perspective.His general argument is that the current "federalism revival" improperly ignores the various ways in which existing "centrally created legal regime[s]" limit local autonomy, 2 and the various ways in which new regimes-the commandeering systems in Printz 3 and New York, 4 for example-may counterintuitively enhance local autonomy.The Court misunderstands the effects of new federal laws, he contends, because it has not properly assessed the place of localities in a broader state and federal structure of governance. 5s part of his analysis, Barron tells the standard story-that cities and towns have no explicit constitutional authority to exercise powers other than those granted by the state. 6However, he continues, "[I]t is widely 1935
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