States Rights
States' Rights, in United States history, political doctrine advocating the strict limitation of the prerogatives of the federal government to those powers explicitly assigned to it in the Constitution of the United States, and reserving to the several states all other powers not explicitly forbidden them. The doctrine of states' rights has been the cause of bitter controversy at several periods in U.S. history. Before the American Civil War, supporters of the doctrine generally held that the federal government was only a voluntary compact of the states, and that the latter could legally refuse to carry out federal enactments that they regarded as unconstitutional encroachments on their sovereignty. Since 1865, states'-rights advocates have generally limited themselves to an insistence on a "strict construction" of the terms of the Constitution, whereby the federal government would be kept from such encroachment. Opponents of states' rights have supported a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, asserting that the federal government may legally exercise "implied" powers that, while not explicitly stated, are in accord with the general powers that are enunciated in the Constitution.