Supreme Court Strips States of Their Power Over the World's Second Most Important Technology

Authors

Steven Ferrey, Suffolk University Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Baylor Law Review

Abstract

The Supreme Court recently stripped 47 or the 50 the states of legal power that the states thought that they possessed over power. The Court re-etched in great relief the most important “bright line” in American law. This article analyzes every important step of how the Supreme Court arrived at the legal point to reset the architecture of American power and did so through a unanimous decision. The article charts key implications for U.S. law going forward.

Recent other decisions issued by the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 7th, 8th, and D.C. Circuit Courts of Appeals — a majority of circuits — reinforce an increasingly exclusive federal architecture for certain power regulation into the future. This article analyzes a palette of decisions rendered by the Supreme Court, half of the federal Courts of Appeals, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, each of which apply and reinterpret the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to determine the future of American power law and regulation. The result is that the states have ceded much of their assumed power in these decisions. The fulcrum of legal power has shifted fundamentally, as analyzed in detail in this article.

First Page

315

Last Page

377

Publication Date

Spring 2017

Recommended Citation

Steven Ferrey, Supreme Court Strips States of Their Power Over the World's Second Most Important Technology, 69 Baylor L. Rev. 315 (2017).

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License