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Ilya Somin reconsiders federalism and the protection of individual freedoms.

In Bond v. United States, an otherwise unremarkable recent Supreme Court ruling, a unanimous Court emphasized a profoundly important point: that “[f]ederalism secures the freedom of the individual” as well as the prerogatives of state governments. In addition to setting boundaries “between different institutions of government for their own integrity,” constitutional federalism also “secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.”

The case has important implications for both the immediate future of constitutional law and deeper issues of constitutional theory. For the near future, the decision suggests that the Court is not likely to reject federalism claims merely because they seem to be motivated by a desire to protect individual freedom rather than an interest in state autonomy for its own sake. More broadly, the case focuses attention on the ways in which limits on federal government power really do promote individual liberty.

Bond arose out of a tragic domestic situation. Philadelphia resident Carol Anne Bond discovered that a close friend of hers was pregnant, and that Bond’s husband was the father. In an effort to get revenge on this woman, Bond allegedly placed dangerous chemicals in areas the other woman was likely to touch, with the result that the latter got a burn on her hand. Prosecutors charged Bond with violating a federal law that forbids the use of chemicals that can cause death or serious injury to persons or animals, except for a “peaceful purpose.” Bond’s lawyers contended that this law is unconstitutional because it violates the Tenth Amendment, which holds that “the powers not delegated” to the federal government by “the Constitution” are “reserved to the States… or to the people.” Only states, Bond argued, have the authority to regulate criminal behavior of this type.

The federal government claimed that Bond is not allowed to raise this argument because the Tenth Amendment’s constraints on the scope of congressional power are intended to protect state governments, not individual citizens. The Supreme Court, as we have seen, decided otherwise because federalism protects individual freedom as well as state sovereignty.

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