Union and States' Rights: A History and Interpretation of Interposition, Nullification, and Secession 150 Years after Sumter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Union and States' Rights: A History and Interpretation of Interposition, Nullification, and Secession 150 Years After Sumter. Edited by Neil H. Cogan. Law and Legal Thought Across Disciplines. (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2014. Pp. [xii], 299. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-937378-13-4.) What are we to make of twenty-first-century Americans' rhetorical and legislative efforts for interposition and nullification of federal legislation, especially the statutes that regulate firearms, healthcare, and marijuana? To take a more troubling case, consider threats of separate state secession made by contemporary Americans, including the governor (Rick Perry) of the second-most populous state (Texas)--a state that already tried to secede by force of arms a century and a half ago. Fortunately, we can turn to Union and States' Rights: A History and Interpretation of Interposition, Nullification, and Secession 150 Years After Sumter as a primer on states' rights. This slim volume collects essays written almost exclusively by law professors on various aspects of the interrelated ideas of interposition, nullification, and secession. Interposition is the right of the states to intercede to protect their citizens from the unconstitutional exercise of federal power. Nullification is the right of the states to suspend an unconstitutional federal law by the enactment of a countervailing state law. Secession is the right of a state to leave the Union because of the federal government's breach of the compact. Editor Neil H. Cogan explains that Union and States' Rights addresses fundamental questions about the American Union from historical, legal, political, and social/moral perspectives (p. 1). Since the founding of the American republic, interposition, nullification, and secession have been topics of discussion or objects of fantasy by disaffected political minorities, ranging from the early-nineteenth-century Federalists to the early-twenty-first-century Tea Party adherents, especially when their minority status seems to be more or less permanent. Despite the ugly shadow cast by slavery over secession in particular, advocates of states' rights raise important questions about how to resolve deep-seated and long-lasting disagreements between the states and the federal government. In short, Cogan wants Union and States' Rights to consider what extraordinary options state governments and individuals in those states do have when seeking relief from an unresponsive or even repressive federal government (p. 1). Of course, this is not just an academic question or a uniquely American concern. It is an enduring problem of large, and sometimes small, democracies. The scholars in this volume are concerned with interposition, nullification, and secession in the United States, but the issue of deep political division in a diverse democracy bedevils nation-states across the globe, including Belgium, Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom. If these disaffected minorities believe that democracy has failed them, their majoritarian compatriots believe they are failing democracy. The essays range from erudite accounts of what James Madison, father of the Constitution and author of the Virginia Resolutions, thought about interposition, nullification, and the federal coercion of states to considerations of how the National Park Service commemorates secession and remembers slavery today at the Fort Sumter National Monument in South Carolina and analysis of the adoption of states' rights rhetoric, complete with veiled allusions to and occasional threats of nullification, by the Tea Party faction of today's Republican Party. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".