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Claus on the Influence of American Federalism Jurisprudence on Australia

By Lawrence Solum

Laurence Claus (University of San Diego School of Law) has posted Federalism and the Judges: How the Americans Made Us What We Are (Australian Law Journal, Vol. 74, p. 107) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Federalism as we know it now is an American invention. But those who wrote and adopted the United States Constitution do not deserve full creative credit, for their document had little to say about how its two levels of government should relate to each other. Producing principles of federalism became a job for judges, to whom conflicts between the governments under the new system were referred. Faced with a similar set of conflicts a century on, Australian judges turned to their American counterparts for guidance.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 28, 2010 (boomark / email).