Today's messages-Reply

[Doug Laycock]

        The transportation and communication revolutions changed the scope
of the commerce power by changing the facts on the ground.  I write
(briefly) about this in 99 Yale LJ 1711, 1735-36 (1990):

        "One could apply the Supreme Court's modern law of interstate
commerce to the economy of 1787, and most commerce would be intrastate.
Land transportation was prohibitively expensive; the cost of shipping goods
thirty miles inland equaled the cost of shipping them to England.  . . .
With the coming of the railroads, the local market was linked to national
markets and lost control of its destiny.  . . .

        "Voters increasingly chose to regulate this integrated national
ecnomy at the Federal level, especially after the Great Depression
overwhelmed the resources of state and local government.  . . .  The concept
of intrastate commerce became obsolete, not because of judicial
interpretation, but because of technological change."


At 03:43 AM 12/31/97 EST, you wrote:
>Doug Laycock writes that we agree on the scope of federal power at the time of
>the Framing but that "we disagree about . . . the impact of the Civil War, the
>transportation and communications revolutions, the New Deal, and eight
>constitutional amendments expanding federal power."  We definitely disagree
>about the impact of the Fourteenth Amendment and its relationship to
>federalism, probably disagree about the New Deal, and may disagree about the
>interpretation of the eight constitutional amendments expanding federal power.
>But how did the transportation and communications revolutions appear here?
>Am I missing something?  I am writing an article on copyright and the
>Constitution and wonder if this is relevant.
>
>Marci Hamilton
>Center of  Theological Inquiry
>Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
>


Douglas Laycock
University of Texas Law School
727 E. Dean Keeton St.
Austin, TX  78705
        512-471-3275 (voice)
        512-471-6988 (fax)
        dlaycock at mail.law.utexas.edu