Past Issues

Jonathan F. Mitchell. Modern judicial review poses a unique threat to federalism, because it enables the Supreme Court to preempt state law and impose nationwide policies by a simple majority vote and without the assent of any other institution. And…

John Kincaid. Numerous and powerful political forces have vested interests in the contemporary idea of cooperative federalism, which prioritizes an obligation of states to cooperate with federal policy initiatives in a system that is essentially prefectorial administration. These forces make impossible…

Daniel Francis. When federalism scholars write about judicial review, they routinely focus on adjudication and neglect or ignore the process of litigation. Nowhere is this approach clearer than in the literature on the “safeguards” of federalism, which contrasts the “judicial…

Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde & Tano Santos. This paper argues that institutions and political party systems are simultaneously determined. A large change to the institutional framework, such as the creation of the euro by a group of European countries, will realign after…

Richard H. Fallon, Jr. Debates about constitutional federalism—by which I roughly mean the division of powers and responsibilities between the national and state governments1—abound.2 Participants typically cast such debates as constitutional in character. Nearly invariably, however, policy concerns exert a…

Richard A. Epstein. There is little doubt that the Framers of the United States Constitution had little awareness of the immense complexities that would creep into the constitutional system that they created in 1787 in Philadelphia. Their challenges were enormous…

Peter J. Boettke, Liya Palagashvili & Ennio E. Piano. Policing in America has made a drastic transformation over the midtwentieth century. Local police agencies today are more federally funded, they “dress” like the military, they police more federal initiatives, and…

Christian Bjørnskov & Stefan Voigt. The study of constitutional emergency provisions remains in its infancy. We present the first overview and analysis of how specific emergency provisions vary across the fifty U.S. state constitutions. The emergency provisions vary considerably across…

Rosamaria Bitetti. European economic crisis has put a strain to the European Union governance model, which has been for a long time characterized by a multi-layered decision-making process, affected more by expert-technocratic knowledge than by democratic participation. This paper analyzes two…