states' rights

Interpretation of the US Constitution that emphasizes the powers retained by individual states and minimizes those given to the federal government, as stated in the Tenth Amendment. The dividing line between state and national sovereignty was left deliberately vague by the framers of the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia in 1787.

The interpretation of the doctrine has been argued throughout US political history. The most crucial of these debates erupted over the slavery issue in the years leading up to the Civil War (1861-65) and resulted in the doctrine of nullification (the right of a state to overrule federal laws that oppose its interests), developed by South Carolina in 1832. The practice of slavery was claimed to be among a state's rights, as was the right to secede from the Union. More recently, federal support for civil-rights campaigns during the 1950s and 1960s was sometimes inhibited by a reluctance to challenge states' rights. States' rights became stronger during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

The Tenth Amendment asserts that, ‘the powers not delegated to the US by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people’. The language of this statement declares the implied powers of state governments. Its wording was designed so that it did not impede federal congressional power or undermine the state constitutions and founding principles of the newly formed US democracy. An earlier draft of the amendment contained the word ‘expressly’ before ‘reserved’, but this was purposely left out of the final version. Consequently, the doctrine was left open to numerous interpretations and exercised in individual court cases and politics.

Those who favour a ‘strict construction’ of the doctrine, as did Thomas Jefferson, are often strong proponents of states' rights, while those favouring a ‘loose construction’, such as Alexander Hamilton, subscribe more to the Federalist school of thought.