Regional Subtleties

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by jaguar
At the same time though, can't the feds override state law anyway, al la californian medial pot laws?

Well, only where a convincing argument can be made that the Federal Government has a compelling interest though one of it's enumerated powers, it can. Otherwise not.

Disputes involving what we call "states rights" will ultimately be resolved in the Supreme Court, who get to make the call as to whose sphere something falls in. "Interstate commerce" is one of the most frequently stretched excuses. "Civil rights" is another.

But in general, the Federal Government can't just arbitrarily interefere with or nullify state law.

Change is both easier and harder to push across several states. It's easier to convince just one state to do something. It's hard to convince all of them, unless they all look at what's happened in states that have already implemented something, and decide that on balance it's good....then they can all implement it, if the other states experience is persuasive. .

This is one reason why we have things like "Uniform Commercial Code" and "Model Fire Code" and "Model Building Codes"....the same language can be independantly adopted by many governmental units (or not, as they think fitting). The UCC is *very* widely adopted though.

But heads up down your way...check out this action:
http://www.couriermail.news.com.au/c...5E8362,00.html

Interesting enough that the intention is a Euro-style "Chineese firewall". But notice the story offered as justification: a school principal is " falsely accused on the Internet of gross acts involving four pupils."

Mr Isaacs, who remains on stress leave, said yesterday he would welcome new Commonwealth defamation laws if they enabled offenders to be dealt with swiftly.

"It's an excellent idea," he said. "It would break through the difficulties of operating across (state) boundaries and protocols which slow the system down. Defamation should definitely be a criminal offence in Queensland and there should be jail penalties. It can destroy someone's life."

Well, I'm sure we'd certainly want to see defamation criminalized to get Mr Issacs back off of "stress leave".

Personally i just think democracy doesn't scale well.

*I* think it's structures like the US constituion that enable it to scale as much and as well as it has in our case.

The rules of Peter Suber's game Nomic are illustrative of some methods for creating a structure that is stable yet revisable. It's very like similar issues in software development; how can you compartmentalize (in both time and space) the impact of change to minimize "unintended consequences".