New Frontiers of State Constitutional Law (Hardback) | Released: 14 Dec 2010

New Frontiers of State Constitutional Law: Dual Enforcement of Norms, edited by James A. Gardner and Jim Rossi, projects a new vision for state constitutional law through a collection of essays that reflect a shift in legal thinking about the relationship between national and subnational systems of constitutional law. This work charts a new course that gives voice to a recent, rising chorus of dissent among scholars and judges, namely that national and subnational systems of constitutional law cannot be adequately understood in isolation from one another. To the contrary, they are linked in a web of jurisprudential, social, and pragmatic connections structured by the American system of federalism. Here, multiple layers of constitutional law function together in a complex, interdependent process in which constitutional norms are developed, articulated, and enforced.

The essays illuminate the role that state constitutions must play in any theory of federalism, and exemplify a fresh approach to state constitutionalism by discussing a range of issues, including recent debates regarding state constitutional protections for same-sex marriage.

The entire work embraces the struggle between state and national power for dominance in American law and places both on equal ground. It contends that constitutional meaning in a federal system is never static and that it evolves over time. In addition to covering methods of judicial review, it discusses the handling of constitutional claims by courts at the state and national level and closely examines the way that courts and constitutions protect individual rights in a federal system.

About the Author:
James A. Gardner is Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Joseph W. Belluck and Laura L. Aswad Professor of Civil Justice at the University at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York, where he also directs the Edwin F. Jaeckle Center for State and Local Democracy. He is the author of: Of Interpreting State Constitutions: A Jurisprudence of Function in a Federal System (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and nearly two dozen articles and chapters on state constitutional law and subnational constitutionalism.

Jim Rossi is the Harry M. Walbosky Professor and Associate Dean for Research at Florida State University College of Law. He is author of numerous articles on state constitutional and administrative law, with a particular focus on state implementation of federal regulatory standards and programs. His books include Regulatory Bargaining and Public Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and a casebook, Energy, Economics and the Environment (Foundation Press, 3d ed. 2010) (with Fred Bosselman, Joel Eisen, David Spence and Jacqueline Lang Weaver).