Charles Tyler 'The Conventional Safeguards of Federalism'

Charles Tyler's teaching and research focuses on federal courts, constitutional law, and civil procedure. His academic work has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Notre Dame Law Review, among others. In 2022, his article, The Adjudicative Model of Precedent, won the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers' Eisenberg Prize for the best publication on appellate law.

Please find below an overview of the presentation:

The Constitution divides power between the state and federal governments and establishes ground rules for the states’ interactions with one another. But what mechanisms ensure that government officials respect the legitimate authority of other governments within the system? The existing scholarship provides two kinds of answer to that question. Our federal system of government is protected either by judicially enforceable legal rules that limit the power of state and federal governments or by the “political safeguards of federalism,” which create incentives for public officials to respect the legitimate authority of other governments.

These answers, even when taken together, are incomplete. They do not exhaust the universe of constraints that maintain our federal system. Missing from the de- bate, this Article maintains, is the recognition of a critical third type of safeguard: constitutional conventions. This Article provides the first full-length account of the role that constitutional conventions play in mediating federalism disputes in the United States. And it principally argues that conventions are essential for un- derstanding how federalism in the United States works in practice.

This insight has at least three important implications. First, understanding the role of conventions helps provide a more complete account of the mechanisms that constitute and maintain our federal system of government. Second, conven- tions supply a plausible basis for distinguishing between acceptable and unaccepta- ble forms of contestation between governments in our system. Third, acknowledging the role of conventions presents several, otherwise puzzling strands of federalism doctrine in a better light.