State Rights

States' Rights are ostensibly guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people." Jurist Marshall DeRosa observes:

States' rights were antecedent to the national governments under the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution. The origins of states' rights can be traced to colonial America, during which time townships, counties, and colonial assemblies had increasingly asserted their respective desires for local self-government and indepedence from British control.1

1. 1. DeRosa, Marshall, “States' Rights,” American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson, eds., (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), p. 812