Federalism is a mode of government that combines a general level of government with a regional level of sub-unit governments, while dividing the powers of governing between the two levels of governments.
Anti-Federalism was a late-18th-century political movement that opposed the creation of a stronger U.S. federal government and which later opposed the ratification of the 1787 Constitution. The previous constitution, called the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, gave state governments more authority. Led by Patrick Henry of Virginia, Anti-Federalists worried, among other things, that the position of president, then a novelty, might evolve into a monarchy. Though the Constitution was ratified and supplanted the Articles of Confederation, Anti-Federalist influence helped lead to the passage of the Bill of Rights.
In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the Tenth Amendment. The enumerated powers that are listed in the Constitution include exclusive federal powers, as well as concurrent powers that are shared with the states, and all of those powers are contrasted with the reserved powers—also called states' rights—that only the states possess. Since the 1940s, the term "states' rights" has often been considered a loaded term or dog whistle because of its use in opposition to federally-mandated racial desegregation and, more recently, same-sex marriage and reproductive rights.
Herbert J. Storing was an American political scientist with broad ranging interests who is best known for reviving the serious study of the American Founding. The constitutional theorist and American politics scholar Walter Berns called him "the most profound man I have encountered in the field of American studies."
In political philosophy, limited government is the concept of a government limited in power. It is a key concept in the history of liberalism.
Reva B. Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Siegel's writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality, and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution. She is currently writing on the role of social movement conflict in guiding constitutional change, addressing this question in recent articles on reproductive rights, originalism and the Second Amendment, the "de facto ERA," and the enforcement of Brown. Her publications include Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking ; The Constitution in 2020 ; and Directions in Sexual Harassment Law. Professor Siegel received her B.A., M.Phil, and J.D. from Yale University, clerked for Judge Spottswood William Robinson III on the D.C. Circuit, and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is active in the American Society for Legal History, the Association of American Law Schools, the American Constitution Society, in the national organization and as faculty advisor of Yale's chapter. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Anti-Federalist Papers is the collective name given to the works written by the Founding Fathers who were opposed to, or concerned with, the merits of the United States Constitution of 1787. Starting on 25 September 1787 and running through the early 1790s, these Anti-Federalists published a series of essays arguing against the ratification of the new Constitution. They argued against the implementation of a stronger federal government without protections on certain rights. The Anti-Federalist papers failed to halt the ratification of the Constitution but they succeeded in influencing the first assembly of the United States Congress to draft the Bill of Rights. These works were authored primarily by anonymous contributors using pseudonyms such as "Brutus" and the "Federal Farmer." Unlike the Federalists, the Anti-Federalists created their works as part of an unorganized group.
In the United States, federalism is the constitutional division of power between U.S. state governments and the federal government of the United States. Since the founding of the country, and particularly with the end of the American Civil War, power shifted away from the states and toward the national government. The progression of federalism includes dual, cooperative, and New Federalism.
Federalist No. 10 is an essay written by James Madison as the tenth of The Federalist Papers, a series of essays initiated by Alexander Hamilton arguing for the ratification of the United States Constitution. It was first published in The Daily Advertiser on November 22, 1787, under the name "Publius". Federalist No. 10 is among the most highly regarded of all American political writings.
James R. Stoner Jr. is Hermann Moyse Jr. Professor and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. Stoner specializes in political theory, English common law, and American constitutionalism.
Constitutional theory is an area of constitutional law that focuses on the underpinnings of constitutional government. It overlaps with legal theory, constitutionalism, philosophy of law and democratic theory. It is not limited by country or jurisdiction.
Paul O. Carrese (kuh-REES) is Director of the School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. For nearly two decades he was a professor of political science at the United States Air Force Academy. He is author of the book The Cloaking of Power: Montesquieu, Blackstone, and the Rise of Judicial Activism and co-editor of three other books. His most recent book is Democracy in Moderation: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Sustainable Liberalism. He has held fellowships at Harvard University; the University of Delhi ; and the James Madison Program, Politics Department, Princeton University. As of January 2017, he became the first Director of the School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University in Tempe, an interdisciplinary great-books program that aims to prepare leaders for American civil society and statesman-like leaders for public service.
The Complete Anti-Federalist is a 1981 seven-volume collection of the scattered Anti-Federalist Papers compiled by Herbert Storing and his former student Murray Dry of the University of Chicago, who oversaw the completion of the project after Storing's death. Michael Lienesch treats Storing's compilation as "definitive," and many of the pamphlets and other materials included had not previously been published in a collection. The collection is noted for its sympathetic portrayal of the Anti-Federalists. The commentary underscores little-known similar positions and arguments made by the birth of the first two-party system in America. Storing points out that many "Anti-Federalists" actually considered themselves Federalists in the sense that a federation is a structure over sovereign states.
James A. Morone is an American political scientist and author, noted for his work on health politics and policy and on popular participation and morality in American politics and political development.
Constitutionalism is "a compound of ideas, attitudes, and patterns of behavior elaborating the principle that the authority of government derives from and is limited by a body of fundamental law".
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is an American political scientist. He is the Tocqueville Professor in the Department of Political Science and Concurrent Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of two books on the principles of the American Founding focusing on religious liberty and the separation of church and state in the United States.
David A. J. Richards is an American constitutional lawyer and moral philosopher, authoring works which integrate interdisciplinary approaches to law and culture. He is the Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law at New York University.
The bibliography of the United States Constitution is a comprehensive selection of books, journal articles and various primary sources about and primarily related to the Constitution of the United States that have been published since its ratification in 1788. Many of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention set out to improve on the inadequate Articles of Confederation, but after much deliberation over state's rights a new Federal Constitution was approved. To allow delegates to make compromises and changes without speculation from the public and newspapers it was decided that the debates and drafting during the Convention be conducted in secret, which is why definitive accounts of the Convention did not appear until 1840, while many books on the Constitution begin after the Convention of 1787. On September 17, 1787, the new Constitution was signed by the delegates, and ratified the following year, which established the government of the United States in March 1789. Since then, many historians and political scientists, some of them critical and controversial, have written about the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers who framed it.
Ernest A. Young is a professor and author of Constitutional law, the federal courts, and foreign relations law. He is an Alston & Bird Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. Young is considered to be one of America's leading authorities on the constitutional law of federalism, and has researched and written extensively on the Rehnquist Court's "Federalist Revival".
