There are times during which local ordinances will typically preempt state law. According to City of Riverside v. Please help us improve our site! No thank you. LII Wex Preemption. Preemption Primary tabs Overview The preemption doctrine refers to the idea that a higher authority of law will displace the law of a lower authority of law when the two authorities come into conflict.
Federal Preemption When state law and federal law conflict, federal law displaces, or preempts, state law, due to the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. State Preemption: Outright, Express, and Implied Preemption Similar to federal and state laws, state laws will usually prevail when state and local laws are in conflict. The Supremacy Clause responded to this problem: just as state courts were not supposed to apply state laws that conflicted with the Constitution itself, so too state courts were not supposed to apply state laws that conflicted with Article IV of the Treaty of Peace.
While modern scholars have debated the circumstances in which treaties should be understood to establish rules of decision for cases in American courts, the Supremacy Clause unquestionably makes such treaties possible.
Within the limits of the powers that Congress gets from other parts of the Constitution, Congress can establish rules of decision that American courts are bound to apply, even if state law purports to supply contrary rules.
Congress also has at least some authority to put certain topics wholly off limits to state law, or otherwise to restrict what state law can validly say about those topics. As long as the directives that Congress enacts are indeed authorized by the Constitution, they take priority over both the ordinary laws and the constitution of each individual state.
But while this feature of the Supremacy Clause was controversial, it is unambiguous. A few other federal statutes have been interpreted as implicitly stripping states of lawmaking power throughout a particular field. But even when a federal statute does not contain an express preemption clause, and even when the statute does not implicitly occupy an entire field to the exclusion of state law, the directives that the statute validly establishes still supersede any conflicting directives that the law of an individual state might purport to supply.
Every year, courts decide an enormous number of cases that involve whether a particular federal statute should be understood to preempt a particular aspect of state law.
Often, the key disputes in these cases boil down to questions of statutory interpretation. If the relevant federal statute includes a preemption clause, what does the clause mean? Should any additional instructions about preemption be inferred? And what is the precise content of all the other legal directives that the statute establishes, whether expressly or by implication? But apart from disputes about what the relevant federal statute should be understood to say and imply, and apart from any disputes about whether the Constitution really gives Congress the power to say and imply those things, some preemption cases may implicate disagreements about the Supremacy Clause itself.
Of course, the basic principle that valid federal statutes preempt conflicting rules of state law is not controversial. But different judicial opinions suggest different views about what counts as a conflict for this purpose, and some of those disagreements may grow out of the Supremacy Clause: while there is no doubt that the Supremacy Clause sometimes requires courts to disregard rules of decision purportedly supplied by state law, there is room for debate about the precise trigger for that requirement.
Under what circumstances does the Supremacy Clause require judges to disregard otherwise applicable state law because it is contrary to federal law? The Supremacy Clause definitely does not mean that each state must base all of its own laws on the same policy judgments reflected in federal statutes. For instance, the fact that Congress has chosen to establish federal income taxes, but has mostly refrained from establishing federal sales taxes, does not mean that state legislatures have to make the same choice as a matter of state law.
Of course, states cannot exempt people from having to pay federal income taxes as required by federal law. But states do not have to structure their own state tax systems on the same model; if state lawmakers think that sales taxes are better than income taxes, states can fund their state governments that way.
Similarly, the fact that Congress has made the possession of certain drugs a federal crime does not prevent states from following a different policy as a matter of state law. While states are not in charge of whether drug possession is a federal crime, they are in charge of whether it is also a state crime.
In these examples, though, the relevant state law does not interfere with the operation of the federal statute. 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. However, the mechanism for challenging the validity of such a statute is a challenge under the state constitution and, depending upon state law, a tort claim.
If there is no violation of federal law or constitutional provision, there is no federal remedy. Previous Next. Liability for Violating the State Constitutions. The Public Health Map - Beta, under revision.
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