Why does federal law override state

The secession of Southern states led to the Civil War. There has even been recent talk by some in Southern states of seceding from the union, although it is very doubtful that will occur. However, the debate continues years later. The case brought in Cole County last month will ultimately be decided in the federal courts and possibly the United States Supreme Court.

Home Local Crime Education State. Facebook Twitter Email. Can states override or ignore federal law? If Congress does not include an express provision for preemption in the text of a statute, a court could still find that the statute preempts state law.

Implied preemption can occur when state and federal laws directly conflict with each other, or when federal laws dominate a field that a state law seeks to regulate. A conflict may occur between federal and state laws when they impose different requirements on a party.

This could make it impossible for a party to comply with both federal and state laws, or even put a party in a position in which compliance with one law puts them in violation of the other.

In Sperry v. Florida , U. Patent Office had licensed a person as a patent agent, but the State of Florida had found this to be unauthorized practice of law. Field preemption may occur when federal laws and regulations have so thoroughly covered a particular field that no room remains for the states.

The Arizona decision mentioned earlier is an example of express field preemption based on authority expressly granted to Congress by the Constitution. The Supreme Court has also recognized implied field preemption based on the sheer volume of federal regulations. In Gade v. No other state went along with Virginia or Kentucky. Since then, nullification attempts have failed on three occasions: In , South Carolina tried to nullify two national tariffs. President Andrew Jackson proclaimed nullification to be treason; Congress authorized Jackson to send troops, and the state backed down.

In , the Supreme Court rejected nullification in Ableman v. Booth had frustrated recapture of a slave in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Supreme Court reinstated the conviction. In , after southern states refused to integrate their schools, the Supreme Court in Cooper v. Fans of nullification count on the states to check federal tyranny. Federal authorities can enforce the federal income tax or federal drug laws without regard to whether state law imposes a state income tax or criminalizes possession of the same drugs.

When application of state law would interfere with the operation of a valid federal statute, modern courts are more likely to conclude that the state law is preempted. Ever since Hines v. Davidowitz , the Supreme Court has sometimes articulated a broad version of this idea.

I do not think that the Supremacy Clause itself compels this understanding of the preemptive effect of federal statutes. In any case where following some aspect of state law would require disregarding a legal directive validly supplied by a federal statute, judges should conclude that the state law is preempted; if judges have to choose between applying state law and applying a legal directive validly supplied by a federal statute, the Supremacy Clause gives priority to the federal law.

But unless state law contradicts federal law in this sense so that judges must choose which one to follow , nothing in the Supremacy Clause prevents judges from following both. When the Supremacy Clause was adopted, judges had long been using an analogous test to decide whether one law repeals another.

Ordinarily, statutes enacted by the same legislative body are cumulative: if a legislature enacts two statutes at different times, and if Statute 2 does not say that it repeals Statute 1, courts normally will apply both. But that is not possible if the two statutes supply contradictory instructions for the same issue.

With respect to statutes enacted by a single legislature, courts traditionally have handled such contradictions by giving priority to the more recent statute. With respect to conflicts between state and federal law, the Supremacy Clause establishes a different hierarchy: federal law wins regardless of the order of enactment. But this hierarchy matters only if the two laws do indeed contradict each other, such that applying one would require disregarding the other.

In my view, then, the trigger for preemption under the Supremacy Clause is identical to the traditional trigger for repeals. In support of this conclusion, there is evidence that the Supremacy Clause was drafted and discussed in light of existing legal doctrines about repeals. That is a more contentious project than nonlawyers might assume.

Federal statutes often are understood to imply some things that they do not say on their face, and legal directives that are established by implication can be just as valid as other legal directives. Different judges, however, have different views about the circumstances in which courts can properly read things into federal statutes and, perhaps, about the extent to which courts can properly articulate subsidiary rules designed to help implement those statutes.

If, as a matter of statutory interpretation, a particular federal statute implicitly forbids states to enact or enforce laws that would interfere with specified federal purposes, and if Congress has the constitutional power to impose this restriction on state law, then the Supremacy Clause would require courts to pay attention. After all, if a federal statute validly strips states of the power to enact or enforce certain kinds of laws, a court that gave effect to such a state law would be disregarding a valid federal directive, in violation of the Supremacy Clause.

Considered as a principle of statutory interpretation, then, the Hines formulation can co-exist with my understanding of the Supremacy Clause. Still, the Hines formulation may not be a very good principle of statutory interpretation. To begin with, many textualists doubt that courts are in a good position to identify the full purposes and objectives behind any particular federal statute.

In any event, members of Congress would not necessarily want to run roughshod over all state laws that serve competing goals.

To take a simple example, a federal statute that exempts multinational companies from certain federal taxes might have the purpose of luring business to the United States, but courts should not automatically infer that Congress is forbidding states to enforce their own generally applicable tax laws against such companies. Likewise, a federal statute that gets rid of prior federal regulations in a particular area might be designed to reap the benefits of the free market, but courts should not automatically infer that Congress must have wanted to prevent individual states from enacting any regulations of their own in the same area.

In the past few decades, the Supreme Court has become somewhat more sensitive to these points. Meanwhile, Justice Thomas has rejected the Hines formulation entirely. At the very least, the Supremacy Clause does not itself require judges to conduct the analysis described in Hines and its progeny.