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( States' rights)
States' rights refers to the idea, in U.S. politics and constitutional law, that U.S. states possess certain rights and political powers in relation to the federal government. A commonly cited source for states' rights is the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights. The states' rights concept is usually used to defend a state law that the federal government seeks to override, or to oppose a perceived violation by the federal government of the bounds of federal authority. The phrase states' rights (and all variants of the words and the phrase) does not appear in the U.S. Constitution or its amendments -- rather the word rights is mostly associated within the Constitution with the phrase the people, while the word powers is mostly associated with government entities such as Congress or states. Therefore, the phrase states' powers is more technically consistent with the terminology of the authors of the U.S. Constitution, with the phrase States' rights popularized by repeated usage. The principle of the supremacy of federal powers over those powers held by the states is based on the supremacy clause of the United States Constitution and was explained in the early 1800s by John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In the seminal case of McCulloch v. Maryland, Marshall asserted that the laws adopted by the federal government, when exercising its Constitutional powers, are generally paramount over any conflicting laws adopted by state governments. After McCulloch, the primary legal issues in this area concerned the scope of the powers Congress possesses under the Constitution, and whether the states possess certain powers to the exclusion of the federal government even if the Constitution does not explicitly limit them to the States. In the period between the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States Constitution, the states had coalesced under a much weaker federal government, pursuant to the Articles of Confederation, which gave the federal government very little, if any, authority to overrule individual states. The Constitution strengthened the federal government, authorizing it to exercise powers deemed necessary to rule over the nation as a whole, with a vague boundary between the two co-existing "levels" of government. In the event a state's law should overlap federal law, the Constitution resolved the conflict in the Supremacy Clause in Article VI in favor of the federal government, which declares federal law the "supreme Law of the Land" and provides that "the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." The Supremacy Clause applies, however, only if the federal government is acting within its Constitutionally authorized powers.
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