When was the supremacy clause made

Thiboutot, U. Halderman, U. Los Angeles, U. Exceptional Child Ctr. Maryland, U. United States, U. See also Reina v. Fisher, 6 U. A state requirement that notice of a federal tax lien be filed in conformity with state law in a state office in order to be accorded priority was held to be controlling only insofar as Congress by law had made it so. Remedies for collection of federal taxes are independent of legislative action of the states.

United States v. Union Central Life Ins. See also United States v. Buffalo Savings Bank, U. Pioneer American Ins. Representative of this concern is the view of Alexander Hamilton. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention of disagreed about many important issues. The framers were divided over the form that the new government would take, how to structure the Congress , whom it would represent, who would select the chief executive, and many issues pertaining to slavery.

At times, these disagreements grew so serious that the Convention appeared in danger of adjourning without successfully completing its work. The framers, however, were in such strong agreement that a new constitution was needed that they worked to resolve their differences.

If there was one issue, however, that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were in wide agreement upon, it was that the new constitution and the laws, treaties, and judicial orders of the new national government must be superior to those of the states.

There was considerable debate, however, over just how far to go in bringing about national supremacy. In opting for such a statement of national superiority, the delegates followed the example of the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles of Confederation, the laws of the Continental Congress were to be superior to those of the states.

The Congress, however, had no real power to require states to comply with its laws, and, as a result, the states frequently went in their own direction without regard for national policies. In order to avoid repeating the experiences of the Articles of Confederation, the authors of the Constitution proposed to grant the new Congress considerable powers and means suitable to achieving compliance with national policies. Mason lost his fight against the Constitution, but not before he won a pledge from James Madison to adopt a national bill of rights that would provide citizens with security against the new government.

Opponents of national supremacy lost the fight over ratification, but the war was not over. Supreme Court had a major impact on the course of American history. One of the most important judicial interpretations of the Supremacy Clause came in Martin v.

In this case, the U. Supreme Court addressed constitutional issues that were of great importance to the fledgling nation. The first question was whether national treaties were binding on the states. The language of the Supremacy Clause seemed to indicate that all laws and treaties made by the national government were in fact supreme to any preexisting state law or colonial treaty.

Not everyone in the United States in the 's was willing to accept that supposition. This treaty guaranteed that property seized from Tories persons who during the Revolution had been loyal to Great Britain would be returned to their original owners.

The Jay Treaty conflicted with Virginia law. Under Virginia law, the Tories had forfeited their land rights. Martin raised an additional supremacy issue that was of considerable importance to the United States. This question concerned whether the U. Other scholars say that this phrase simply refers to the lawmaking process described in Article I, and does not necessarily distinguish duly enacted federal statutes that conform to the Constitution from duly enacted federal statutes that do not.

That point is a pillar of the argument for judicial review. In addition, the Supremacy Clause explicitly specifies that the Constitution binds the judges in every state notwithstanding any state laws to the contrary.

The Supremacy Clause also establishes a noteworthy principle about treaties. Under the traditional British rule, treaties made by the Crown committed Great Britain on the international stage, but they did not have domestic legal effect; if Parliament wanted British courts to apply rules of decision drawn from a treaty, Parliament needed to enact implementing legislation. The Supremacy Clause breaks from this principle.

Subject to limits found elsewhere in the Constitution, treaties are capable of directly establishing rules of decision for American courts.

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.