Federal State Law Conflicts Legal Hierarchy

Do this, don\\\\\\\'t do that, can\\\\\\\'t you read the sign? – Five Man Electrical Band, 1970

The American jurisprudence system is comprised of a vast network of federal, state and local entities which create, administer and adjudicate tens of thousands of laws, regulations and statutes. Notwithstanding the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Tenth Amendment’s constitutional guarantee that, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to … the people,” most Americans recognize that scarcely any aspect of daily life in the United States today is not covered, at least in part, by some type of federal or state law as reflected in the epigraph above. Against this backdrop, it is important to understand where all of these laws come from and why they continue to proliferate in the American jurisprudence system. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to describe the major sources of law in the United States as well as how these different sources of law can complement or conflict with each other. Finally, a discussion concerning a hypothetical client’s case involving a conflict between laws is followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

The major sources of law under the American jurisprudence system are, in descending order of priority, the U.S. Constitution and then state constitutions as well as various statutes, regulations and case law that establish legal precedent which can be applied to similar cases in the future. Some definitional clarity is provided by Black’s Law Dictionary concerning these primary sources of law as noted below:

Constitution: The organic and fundamental law of a nation or state, which may be written or unwritten, establishing the character and concept of its government, laying the basic principles to which its internal life is to be conformed, organizing the government, and regulating, distributing, and limiting the functions of its different departments, and prescribing the extent and manner of the exercise of sovereign powers (p. 311).

Statute: A formal written enactment of a legislative body, whether federal, state, city, or county [which is] an act of the legislature declaring, commanding, or prohibiting something (p. 1410).

Regulation: A rule or order prescribed for management of government; a regulating principle; a precept (p. 1286).

Case law: The aggregate of reported cases as forming a body of jurisprudence, or the law of a particular subject as evidenced or formed by the adjudged cases, in distinction to statutes and other sources of law which includes reported cases that interpret statutes, regulations, and constitutional provisions (p. 216).

In addition, the power to make new laws, statutes and regulations, amend existing ones or remove them from the body of law altogether is invested in the three branches of federal and state governments, the executive, legislative and judicial branches. These three branches of government are also among the primary sources of law in the United States today (Sources of law, 2022). Given the multiple sources of laws and their various forms, it is not surprising that some may complement each other while there may be some conflicts in other cases as discussed further below

It may be impossible to determine instances where laws, statutes and regulations overlap in jurisdiction and intent simply by virtue of their voluminosity. Not only is the canon of existing federal laws vast, thousands of new laws are added each year, thereby making the potential for laws to complement or conflict with each other greater over time. Given that the U.S. has enjoyed 244 years of law-making, it is little wonder that legal scholars have been unable to tabulate an exact total, but estimates range upwards to 30,000 laws at the federal level in the United States, including thousands of criminal laws which were “scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law” (Cali, 2013, para. 3). It is especially noteworthy that this estimate was made in 1982, the latest such attempt by the U.S. Congress to make this determination in what has been described as a “fruitless project” (Cali, 2013, para. 3).

Add to this virtually uncountable number of existing federal laws, the thousands of new law, statutes and regulations made at the state and local levels make the potential for conflict is even more pronounced. Notwithstanding the prolificity of federal and state governments in formulating new laws, the majority of binding rules in the form of statutes and regulations (a ratio of about 18 to 1) are generated by administrative agencies instead of elected lawmakers today (Crews, 2017). Because the U.S. Constitution represents the supreme law of the land, the Supremacy Clause set forth in Article VI, Clause 2 assumes priority over state laws in the case of conflicts. In this regard, Dow (2012) reports that, “When a state law conflicts with a federal law, the Supremacy Clause provides a resolution: federal law trumps state law” (p. 1009).

The legal maxim that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” does not necessary mean that clients have the requisite mens rea that is required for a conviction, but there are some obvious examples of how state and federal laws complement and conflict with each other, with federal and state cannabis laws standing out among these today. There are some other instances, though, where complementary federal and state laws can increase the severity of criminal offenses such as the case with hate crimes. While hate per se is not a crime in the United States, the penalties that are associated with certain crimes which are committed that are fueled by hate are more severe. For instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation defines a hate crime as being a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity” (Defining a hate crime, 2022, para. 3).