Congress in the latter part of the nineteenth century decided to enact a series of statutes facilitating state enforcement of their respective criminal laws. Subsequently, Congress enacted statutes federalizing what had been solely state crimes, thereby establishing federal court and state court concurrent jurisdiction over these crimes. Federalization of state crimes has been criticized by numerous scholars, U.S. Supreme Court justices, and national organizations. Such federalization has congested the calendars of the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals leading to delays in...

While there is a vast amount of scholarship on the US Constitution, very little of it addresses Article IV. The article's first section, the Full Faith and Credit Clause, requires that individual states must respect "the public acts, accords, and judicial proceedings of every other state," and the second section, the Privileges and Immunity Clause, prevents one state from treating the citizens of another state in a discriminatory manner. In Unifying the Nation, Joseph F. Zimmerman provides a unique and comprehensive examination of court cases pertaining to both sections. Article IV, he...

Congress possesses broad regulatory powers, including the power of complete or partial preemption of state and local regulatory powers. Congress rarely enacted preemption statutes before the twentieth century, but since the 1960s such interventions have grown significantly in number, now totaling over seven hundred, and have transformed the nature of the American federal system. In Innovative Congressional Minimum Standards Preemption Statutes, Joseph F. Zimmerman provides the background and history of this critical transformation, classifying the forms these federal interventions have...