Police Powers Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In the United States, police power refers to the authority granted to state governments giving them the ability to make laws that maintain order and safeguard the health, morals, public safety, and welfare of state citizens. This term is interpreted expansively and does not refer simply to the narrow subject of law enforcement. The source of this type of state authority stems from the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which declares: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In other words, this constitutional provision says that those powers not assigned to the national government end up residing with the states.

These so-called reserved powers as guaranteed in the Tenth Amendment operate to protect the states’ role in the U.S. federal system. Police powers are an important aspect of these reserved powers. State legislatures exercise their respective police power by directly enacting statues as well as by delegating such authority to their subordinate governmental entities in the form of counties, municipalities, and special districts. Much of what state and local governments do is a function of their police powers’ authority.

Clarification By The Courts On The Range Of Police Powers

The constitutionally acceptable range and reach of police powers is a challenge to precisely determine. It covers various governmental regulations of myriad activities and various relationships. Leading examples of the legitimate exercise of police powers include regulations placed on the following: speed limits on roadways, the licensing of professions and trades, zoning and land use, marriage, gambling, prostitution, discrimination, parking, alcoholic beverages, education, health, business and contracts, sanitation, the workplace, and crime. Disputes have inevitably arisen over how far government can go in the exercise of this power.

Generally speaking, in the last several decades, the courts have ruled in favor of the government when the laws in question are concluded to truly advance the public good. This comes with the recognition that the state must have the necessary discretion to determine for itself what constitutes the public need and the best way to reach that goal via its statutes. Thus, in the current era, the courts manifest some deference to the legislature in this regard—all levels of the federal courts have demonstrated a reluctance to strike down such laws, except for statutes seen as infringing upon free speech, free exercise of religion, and fair hearing procedural protections.

To be constitutionally acceptable, a particular exercise of the police powers by the state must be congruent with both the U.S. Constitution and the relevant state constitution, especially in terms of the protections as laid out in the due process clause found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Thus, if a law is enacted on the basis of police powers, and that law does not promote the health, morals, safety, or welfare of the public, it is more prone to be struck down as an unconstitutional violation of due process guarantees of life, liberty, and property. The typical grounds for such litigation is the contention that such a law constitutes the government’s illegal “taking” of a private citizen’s actual property or otherwise hinders the citizen’s use of that property.

Police Powers And Federalism Versus States’ Rights

According to traditional constitutional theory, the federal government does not possess police powers per se in the same way that state governments do. The federal government is considered one of the directly expressed or enumerated powers as laid out in the Constitution, coupled then with implied powers that allow the federal government to carry out those enumerated powers. The “necessary and proper” clause in Article I of the Constitution, then, has been interpreted by some as serving as the functional source of federal police powers, with the qualifier that federal laws must find some relatively specific basis in the enumerated powers set out in the Constitution. State laws can find their legitimacy in the more open-ended notion of police powers, as part of a state’s reserved powers.

State and federal court decisions constitute one of the primary sets of constraints on state police powers and the U.S. Supreme Court has played a particularly salient role in clarifying the extents and limits of police powers as well as the nature of federal-state relations in this regard. There is a dynamic and evolutionary quality to this area of jurisprudence, as membership changes on the high court bring about differing perspectives and subsequent legal precedents on such state regulations. Before 1937, dominated by business-friendly and conservative justices, the Supreme Court was quite willing to strike down as unconstitutional many state laws that drew their inherent police powers as their authority. A prime example is Lochner v. New York (1905), when the Court rejected the “liberty of contract” as an abridgement of a New York state law that limited the number of hours bakers could work on a weekly basis— this “liberty” abridgment for the Court was a due process violation. This trend abated when membership on the Court changed and President Franklin Roosevelt was able to appoint more liberal justices who abandoned the prior orientation and started to uphold such state laws.

This remains an ongoing legal and societal debate in the current era about what constitutes the appropriate extent of state police powers. Contemporary examples include political controversies and court cases revolving around regulation of smoking in public areas, regulation of pornography online, and government surveillance after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The question over the proper level of tradeoff between individual liberty, on one hand, and the ability of government to ensure order, on the other, remains at the heart of police powers debates and discussions.

Bibliography:

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