a: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations; b: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; c: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation (Source: Merriam – Webster Collegiate Dictionary)

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The concept of culture

What has been termed the classic definition of culture was provided by the 19th-century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in the first paragraph of his Primitive Culture (1871):

Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.

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CUSTOM

a: a usage or practice common to many or to a particular place or class or habitual with an individual b: long-established practice considered as unwritten law c: repeated practice d: the whole body of usages, practices, or conventions that regulate social life. (Source: Merriam – Webster Collegiate Dictionary)

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in English law, an ancient rule of law for a particular locality, as opposed to the common law of the country. It has its origin in the Anglo-Saxon period, when local customs formed most laws affecting family rights, ownership and inheritance, contracts, and personal violence. The Norman conquerors granted the validity of customary law, adapting it to their feudal system. After the great transformations of the 13th and 14th centuries, when English law was given statutory authority under the crown, the “customs of the realm” became England's common law. Since that time, a local custom outside of common law has been considered valid if it: (1) has been practiced peaceably and continuously from time immemorial—in practice, as long as living testimony can recall; (2) is reasonable, certain, and obligatory; and (3) is confined to a specific locality. With the cultural uniformity of the modern age, custom as a force of law retains its validity, but in practice it has lost ground to common law. (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica - 2003)

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Custom and usage. A usage or practice of the people, which by common adoption and acquiescence, and by long and unvarying habit, has become compulsory, and has acquired the force of law with respect to the place or subject matter to which it relates. It results from a long series of actions, constantly repeated, which have, by such repetition and by uninterrupted acquiescence, acquired the force of tacit and common consent. Louiseville & N. R. Co. v. Reverman, 243 Ky. 702, 49 S.W.2d 558, 560. An habitual or customary practice, more or less widespread, which prevails within a geographical or sociological area; usage is a course of conduct based on a series of actual occurrences. Corbin-Dykes Elec, Co. v. Burr, 18 Ariz.App. 101, 500 P.2d 632, 634.

Classification. Customs are general, local or particular. General customs are such as prevail throughout a country and become the law of that country, and their existence is to be determined by the court. Or as applied to usages of trade and business, a general custom is one that is followed in all cases by all persons in the same business in the same territory, and which has been so long established that persons sought to be charged thereby, and all other living in the vicinity, may be presumed to have known of it and to have acted upon it as they had occasion. Local customs are such as prevail only in some particular district or locality; or in some city, county, or town. Particular customs are nearly the same, being such as affect only the inhabitants of some particular district.

Usage distinguished. Usage” is a repetition of acts, and differs from “custom” in that the latter is the law or general rule which arises from such repetition; while there may be usage without custom, there can not be a custom without a usage accompanying or preceding it. U.S. for Use of E. & R. Const. Co. v. Guy H. James Const. Co., D.C. Tenn. 380 F.Supp.1193, 1209. (Source: Blacks Law Dictionary, 5^th Ed.)

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LAW OF NATIONS

“The Law of Nations is the science of the rights which exist between Nations or States, and the obligations corresponding to these rights.” (The Law of Nations, Vattel, Book 1 Sec. 3)

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“The law of nations is not international law, strictly speaking, for it does not affect the mutual society of nations in relation to one another; it affects only each particular people in a state of peace.” (The Law of War & Peace, Hugo Grotius, (Huig de Groot 1625) Book II, Chapter VIII, Sec. 1(2)

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FUNDAMENTALS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

Sources of international law
The law-creating processes of international law

The general principles of law recognized by civilized nations

Such principles must fulfill two requirements. To qualify under this heading, a legal principle must be a general principle of law, as distinct from a legal rule of a more limited functional scope. It must be recognized and shared by a fair number of civilized nations and probably include representation of at least the principal legal systems.

The general principles of law come into play only as a subsidiary law-creating agency, that is, in the absence of competing rules of international customary law or treaty law. Their existence in the background forestalls any argument that supposed gaps in international law prevent international judicial organs from deciding on the substance of any dispute submitted to their jurisdiction.” (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica - 2003

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Necessary Law of Nations

“We use the term necessary Law of Nations for that law which results from applying the natural law to Nations. It is necessary because Nations are absolutely bound to observe it. It contains those precepts which the natural law dictates to States, and it is no less binding upon them than it is upon individuals. For States are composed of men, their policies are determined by men, and these men are subject to the natural law under whatever capacity they act. This same law is called by Grotius and his followers the internal Law of Nations, inasmuch as it is binding upon the conscience of Nations. Several writers call it the natural Law of Nations.

Since this law is not subject to change and the obligations which it imposes are necessary and indispensable, Nations can not alter it by agreement, nor individually or mutually release themselves from it.

It is by the application of this principle that a distinction can be made between lawful and unlawful treaties or conventions and between customs which are innocent and reasonable and those which are unjust and deserving of condemnation.

Things which are just in themselves and permitted by the necessary Law of Nations may form the subject of an agreement by Nations or may be given sacredness and force through practice and custom. Indifferent affairs may be settled either by treaty, if Nations so please, or by the introduction of some suitable custom or usage. But all treaties and customs contrary to the dictates of the necessary law of Nations are unlawful…..” (Source: The Law of Nations, Vattel, Book I, §§ 7 – 9)

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“The law of nations is a complex system, composed of various ingredients. It consists of general principles of right and justice, equally suitable to the government of individuals in a state of natural equality, and to the relation and conduct of nations; of a collection of usages and customs, the growth of civilization and commerce; and a code of conventional or positive law. In the absence of these latter regulations, the intercourse and conduct of nations are to be governed by principles fairly to be deduced from the rights and duties of nations, and the nature of moral obligation; and we have authority of the lawyers of antiquity, and of some of the first masters in the modern school of public law, for placing the moral obligations of nations and individuals on similar grounds, and for considering individual and national morality as parts of one and the same science.” (Source: Commentaries On American Law, James Kent, Volume I, Lecture I)

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“These three divisions of the Law of Nations, the voluntary, the conventional, and the customary law, form together the positive Law of Nations, for they all proceed from the agreement of Nations; the voluntary law from their presumed consent; the conventional law from their express consent; and the customary law from their tacit consent. And since there are no other modes of deducing a law from the agreement of Nations, there are but these three divisions of the positive Law of Nations.” (Sources: The Law of Nations, Vattel, Book I, § 27)

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“As to corruption, the case is not supposable. He must have been very unfortunate in his intercourse with the world, or possess a weak heart very susceptible of such impressions, who can think it probable that the President and two thirds of the Senate will ever be capable of such unworthy conduct. The idea is too gross and invidious to be entertained. But in such case, if it should ever happen, the treaty so obtained from us would, like all other fraudulent contracts, be null and void by the law of nations.” (Source: Federalist Papers No. 64)

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“law of nations This somewhat obsolete term is synonymous with international law : I Oppenheim 4 and 6; Briefly, Law of Nations (6^th ed.), 1. Most writers and practitioners have for the last century preferred the term ‘international law.’” (Source: Encyclopaedic Dictionary of International Law, Parry & Grant (1988 ed.)

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LIBERTY

1. The quality or state of being free a: the power to do as one pleases b: freedom from physical restraint c: freedom from arbitrary or despotic control d. the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges e: the power of choice

2. a: a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant or privilege b: permission especially to go freely within specified limits (Source: Merriam – Webster Collegiate Dictionary)

Liberty. 1. Freedom from restraint. The power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, Except from the laws of nature.

2. Liberty is divided into civil, natural, personal and political.

3. Civil Liberty is the power to do whatever is permitted by the constitution of the state and the laws of the land. It is no other that natural liberty, so far restrained by human laws, and no further, operating equally upon all citizens, as is necessary and expedient for the general advantage of the public. I Black. Com. 125; Parley’s Mor. Phil. 6, e. 5; Swift’s Syst. 12.

4. That system of laws is alone calculated to maintain civil liberty, which leaves the citizen entirely master of his own conduct, except in those points in which the public good requires some direction and restraint. When a man is retrained in his natural liberty by no municipal laws but those which are requisite to prevent his violating the natural law, and to promote the moral and physical welfare of the community, he is legally possessed of the fullest enjoyment of his civil rights of individual liberty. But it must not be inferred that individuals are to be judged for themselves how far the law may justifiably restrict their individual liberty; for it is necessary to the welfare of the commonwealth, that the law should be obeyed, and thence derived the legal maxim, that no man may be wiser than the law.

5. NATURAL LIBERTY Is the right which nature gives to all mankind, of disposing of their persons and property after the manner they judge most consonant to their happiness, on condition of their acting within the limits of the law of nature, and that they not in any way abuse is to the prejudice of other men. Burlamaqui, Ch. 3, Sec. 15; 1 Bl. Com. 134.

6. Personal Liberty is the independence of our actions of all other will than our own. Wolff, Inst. Nat. § 77. It consists in the power of locomotion, of changing situations, or removing one’s person to whatever place one’s inclination may direct, without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due process of law. 1 Bl. Com. 134.

7. Political Liberty may be defined to be the security by which, from the constitution, form the nature of the established government, the citizens enjoy civil liberty. No ides or definitions are more distinguishable than those of civil and political liberty, yet they are generally confounded. 1 Bl. Com. 6, 25. The political liberty of a state is based upon those fundamental laws which establish the distribution of legislative and executive powers. The political liberty of a citizen is that tranquility of mind, which is the effect of an opinion that he is in perfect security; and to insure this security, the government must be such that one citizen shall not fear another. (Bouvier’s Law Dictionary(1859 ed.))

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NATION

“Nations or States are political bodies, societies of men who have united together and combined their forces, in order to procure their mutual welfare and security.

Such a society has its own affairs and interests; it deliberates and takes resolution in common, and it thus becomes a moral personl having and understanding and a will peculiar to itself, and susceptible at once of obligations and of rights.” (Source: Law of Nations, Vattel, Book 1 Sec. 1,2)

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OBLIGATION

To understand this properly we must note that obligations and the corresponding rights produced by them are distinguished into internal and external. Obligations are internal in so far as they bind the conscience and are deduced from the rules of our duty; they are external when considered relatively to other men as producing some right on their part. Internal obligations are always the same in nature, though they may vary in degree; external obligations, however, are divided into perfect and imperfect, and the rights they give rise to are likewise perfect and imperfect. Perfect rights are those which carry with them the right of compelling the fulfillment of the corresponding obligations; imperfect rights can not so compel. Perfect obligations are those which give rise to the right of enforcing them; imperfect obligations give but the right to request.

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PROPERTY

“The term ‘property’ as used in the Taking Clause includes the entire ‘group of rights inhering in the citizen’s [ownership].’ It is not used in the ‘vulgar and untechnical sense of the physical thing with respect to which the citizen exercises rights recognized by law. [Instead, it] denotes[s] the group of rights inhering in the citizen’s relation to the physical thing, as the right to possess, use and dispose of it.’…The constitutional provision is addressed to every sort of interest the citizen may possess.” (U.S. Supreme Court PruneYard Shopping Ctr. V. Robins)

In the days of the Framers “property” often referred to those attributes that were “proper,” or appropriate, to one’s situation or station in life. Thus, a “proper” attribute of a free person is liberty; that is what John Locke meant when he said that one has property in one’s rights. “Property,” then, consists of rights that must be respected by others, not just land or buildings or shares of corporate stock.

Property Rights Include Possession, Use, and Disposition.

The right to exclusive possession, the right to use and enjoy, and the right to dispose of one’s interest through devise, sale, or gift. Exclusive possession has always been recognized as a fundamental property right. Blackstone referred to property as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe. The Supreme Court has declared that “the right to exclude others” is “one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property.” (CATO Institute Policy Analysis “The Birth of the Property Rights Movement, Steven J. Eagle)

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RIGHTS

RIGHTS. As a noun, and taken in an abstract sense, means justice, ethical correctness, or consonance with the rules of law or the principles of morals. In this signification it answers to one meaning of the Latin “jus,” and serves to indicate law in the abstract, considered s the foundation of all rights, or the complex of moral principles which impart the character of justice to all positive law, or give it an ethical content. As a noun, and taken in a concrete sense, a power, privilege, faculty, or demand, inherent in one person and incident upon another. Rights are defined generally as “powers of free action.” And the primal rights pertaining to men are enjoyed by human beings purely as such, being grounded in personality, and existing antecedently to their recognition by positive law. But leaving the abstract moral sphere, and giving to the term juristic content, a “right” is well defined as “a capacity residing in one man of controlling, with the assent and assistance of the state, the actions of others.”

As an adjective, the term “right” means just, morally correct, consonant with ethical principles or rules of positive law. It is the opposite of wrong, unjust, illegal.

A power, privilege, or immunity guaranteed under a constitution, statutes or decisional laws, or claimed as a result of long usage. See Bill of Rights; Civil liberties; Civil Rights Acts; Natural Rights.

In a narrower signification, an interest or title in an object of property; a just and legal claim to hold, use, or enjoy it, or to convey or donate it, as he may please.

A legally enforceable claim of one person against another, that the other shall do a given act, or shall not do a given act. Restatement of the Law of Property § 1.

That which one person ought to have or receive from another, it being withheld from him, or not in his possession. In this sense “right” has the force of “claim,” and is properly expressed by the Latin “jus.”

See also Conditional Right; Correlative rights; Droit; Jus; Natural Rights; Power; Recht;

Vested rights.

General Classification

Rights may be described as perfect or imperfect, according to their action or scope is clear, settled, and determinate, or is vague and unfixed.

Rights are also either in personam or in rem. A right in personam is one which imposes an obligation on a definite person. A right in rem is one which imposes an obligation on persons generally; i.e., either on all the world or on all the world except certain determinate persons. Thus, if I am entitled to exclude all persons from a given piece of land, I have a right in rem in respect of that land; and if there are one or more persons, A., B., and C., whom I am not entitled to exclude from it, my right is still a right in rem.

Rights may also be described as either primary or secondary. Primary rights are those which can be created without reference to rights already existing. Secondary rights can only arise for the purpose of protecting or enforcing primary rights. They are either preventative (protective) or remedial (reparative).

Preventative or protective secondary rights exist in order to prevent the infringement or loss of primary rights. They are judicial when they require the assistance of a court of law for their enforcement, and extrajudicial when they are capable of being exercised by the party himself. Remedial or reparative secondary rights are also either judicial or extrajudicial. They may further be divided into (1) rights of restitution or restoration, which entitle the person injured to be replaced in his original position; (2) rights of enforcement, which entitle the person injured to the p0erformance of an act by the person bound; and (3) rights of satisfaction or compensation.

With respect to the ownership of external objects of property, rights may be classed as absolute and qualified. An absolute right gives to the person in whom it inheres the uncontrolled dominion over the object at all times and for all purposes. A qualified right gives the possessor a right to the object for certain purposes or under certain circumstances only. Such is the right of a bailee to recover the article bailed when it has been unlawfully taken from him by a stranger.

Rights are also either legal or equitable. The former is the case where the person seeking to enforce the right for his own benefit has the legal title and a remedy at law. The latter are such as are enforceable only in equity; as, at the suit of cestui que trust. Procedurally, under Rules of Civil Procedure, both legal and equitable rights are enforced in the same court under a single cause of action.

Constitutional Rights

There is also a classification of rights, with respect to the constitution of civil society. Thus, according to Blackstone, “the rights of persons, considered in their natural capacities, are of two sorts, - absolute and relative; absolute, which are such as appertain and belong to particular men, merely as individuals or single persons; relative, which are incident to them as members of society, and standing in various relations to each other.” 1 Bl.Comm.123.

Rights are also classified in constitutional law as natural, civil, and political, to which there is sometimes added the class of “personal rights.”

Natural rights are those which grow out of the nature of man and depend upon personality; as distinguished from such as are created by law; or those which are plainly assured by natural law; or those which, by fair deduction from the present physical, moral, social, and religious characteristics of man, he must be invested with, and which he ought to have realized for him in jural society, in order to fulfill the ends to which his nature calls him. Such are the rights of life, liberty, privacy, and good reputation.

Civil rights are such as belong to every citizen of the state or country, or, in a wider sense, to all its inhabitants, and are not connected with the organization or administration of government. They include the rights of property, marriage, equal protection of laws, freedom of contract, trial by jury, etc. Or, as otherwise defined, civil rights appertaining to a person by virtue of his citizenship in a state or community. Such term may also refer, in its very general sense, to rights capable of being enforced or redressed in a civil action. Also, a term applied to certain rights secured to citizens of the United States by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution, and by various acts of Congress (e.g. Civil Rights Acts) made in pursuance thereof. See Bill of Rights; Civil liberties; Civil Rights Acts.

Political rights consist in the power to participate, directly or indirectly, in the establishment or administration of government, such as the right of citizenship, that of suffrage, the right to hold public office, and the right to petition.

Personal rights is a term of rather vague import, but generally it may be said to mean the right of personal security, comprising those of life, limb, body, health, reputation, and the right of personal liberty. (Source: Black’s Law Dictionary, 5^th Ed.)

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NATURAL RIGHTS

Historical development

Natural law transformed into natural rights

The modern conception of natural law as meaning or implying natural rights was elaborated primarily by thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries. The intellectual—and especially the scientific—achievements of the 17th century (including the materialism of Hobbes, the rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz, the pantheism of Spinoza, and the empiricism of Bacon and Locke) encouraged a belief in natural law and universal order; and during the 18th century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, a growing confidence in human reason and in the perfectibility of human affairs led to the more comprehensive expression of this belief. Particularly important were the writings of John Locke, arguably the most important natural-law theorist of modern times, and the works of the 18th-century philosophies centered mainly in Paris, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Locke argued in detail, mainly in writings associated with the English Revolution of 1688 (the “Glorious Revolution”), that certain rights self-evidently pertain to individuals as human beings (because these rights existed in “the state of nature” before humankind entered civil society); that chief among them are the rights to life, liberty (freedom from arbitrary rule), and property; that, upon entering civil society,

humankind surrendered to the state—pursuant to a “social contract”—only the right to enforce these natural rights and not the rights themselves; and that the state's failure to secure these rights gives rise to a right to responsible, popular revolution. The philosophies, building on Locke and others and embracing many and varied currents of thought with a common supreme faith in reason, vigorously attacked religious and scientific dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and social and economic restraints. They sought to discover and act upon universally valid principles governing nature, humanity, and society, including the inalienable “rights of Man,” which they treated as a fundamental ethical and social gospel.

Not surprisingly, this liberal intellectual ferment exerted a profound influence in the Western world of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Together with the Revolution of 1688 in England and the resulting Bill of Rights, it provided the rationale for the wave of revolutionary agitation that swept the West, most notably in North America and France. Thomas Jefferson, who had studied Locke and Montesquieu, gave poetic eloquence to the plain prose of the 17th century in the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed by the 13 American colonies on July 4, 1776: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Similarly, the marquis de Lafayette, who won the close friendship of George Washington and who shared the hardships of the U.S. War of Independence, imitated the pronouncements of the English and American revolutions in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of August 26, 1789, proclaiming that "men are born and remain free and equal in rights" and that "the aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man."

In sum, the idea of human rights, though known by another name, played a key role in late 18th- and early 19th-century struggles against political absolutism. It was, indeed, the failure of rulers to respect the principles of freedom and equality that was responsible for this development.

“Nonsense upon stilts”: The critics of natural rights

The idea of human rights as natural rights was not without its detractors, however. In the first place, because it was frequently associated with religious orthodoxy, the doctrine of natural rights became less attractive to philosophical and political liberals. Additionally, because they were conceived in essentially absolutist terms, natural rights were increasingly considered to conflict with one another. Most importantly, the doctrine of natural rights came under powerful philosophical and political attack from both the right and the left.

In England, for example, conservative political thinkers such as Edmund Burke and David Hume united with liberals such as Jeremy Bentham to condemn the doctrine, the former out of fear that public affirmation of natural rights would lead to social upheaval, the latter out of concern lest declarations and proclamations of natural rights substitute for effective legislation. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke—a believer in natural law who nonetheless denied that the "rights of Man" could be derived from it—criticized the drafters of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen for proclaiming the "monstrous fiction" of human equality, which, he argued, serves but to inspire "false ideas and vain expectations in men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life." Bentham, one of the founders of Utilitarianism, was no less scornful. "Rights," he wrote, "is the child of law; from real law come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from 'law of nature,' come imaginary rights. ... Natural rights is simple nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights (an American phrase)... [is] rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts." Agreeing with Bentham, Hume insisted that natural law and natural rights are unreal metaphysical phenomena.

This assault upon natural law and natural rights intensified and broadened during the 19th and early 20th centuries. John Stuart Mill, despite his vigorous defense of liberty, proclaimed that rights ultimately are founded on utility. The German jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny, England's Sir Henry Maine, and other "historicalist" legal thinkers emphasized that rights are a function of cultural and environmental variables unique to particular communities. The English jurist John Austin argued that the only law is "the command of the sovereign" (a phrase of Hobbes). And the logical positivists of the early

20th century insisted that the only truth is that which can be established by verifiable experience and that therefore ethical pronouncements are not cognitively significant. By World War I, there were scarcely any theorists who would defend the "rights of Man" along the lines of natural law. Indeed, under the influence of 19th-century German Idealism and parallel expressions of rising European nationalism, there were some—the Marxists, for example—who, though not rejecting individual rights altogether, maintained that rights, from whatever source derived, belong to communities or whole societies and nations preeminently. (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica – 2003)

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STATES RIGHTS

State Rights. All governmental rights or powers retained by the individual states of a federal union under the provisions of a federal constitution. In the United States, Switzerland, and Australia, such powers are those that remain after the powers of the central government are enumerated in the constitution. In Canada and Germany, on the other hand, the powers of both the levels of government are defined by specific constitutional provisions.

In the United States the term states' rights has also been widely used for a variety of political programs. Before the Civil War it was the rallying cry of Southern opponents of Northern-inspired tariffs and Northern proposals to abolish or restrict slavery. The doctrine of a state's right to annul an act of the federal government within its boundaries became known as nullification (q.v.). By virtue of a state's sovereignty, the Southern states argued that a state also had the right to secede. This constitutional question was only resolved by the North's victory in the American Civil War (1861–65). In the second half of the 20th century, “states' rights” became a catchword of some who opposed racial integration in public schools and the federal government's efforts to enforce such integration.

The amount of governmental authority actually remaining in the member governments varies greatly among federal systems. It is perhaps greatest in the United States and weakest in countries such as Mexico and Brazil, where most power is concentrated in the central government and the states are little more than administrative agencies. State power declined rapidly after 1900 in the United States and somewhat similarly in Canada and Australia. The major causes of this trend in the United States were the increased activity of the central government through the power of Congress to control interstate commerce, federal financial subsidies to the state governments or their subdivisions, national measures for combating economic depression, and participation in World Wars I and II.

In general, states' rights in such countries as the United States suffer more from the financial subsidies of the federal government than from the commerce clause. These subsidies sometimes entail substantial central control in fields that are not included in the federal government's enumerated powers. If the state government rejects the subsidy, it presumably damages its area financially. The result of the subsidy process in the second half of the 20th century in the United States was that the federal government exercised varying degrees of influence, ranging from considerable to determinative, on vocational education, public housing, airport construction, sewage-plant construction, state and local road construction, fish and game conservation, and other fields that a reading of the Constitution would clearly indicate were states' rights. Canadian and Australian experience in the 20th century was similar, the central governments concerned moving through subsidies into many fields of state or provincial action.

States' rights, however, may persist a long time. In three of the federal countries—the United States, Australia, and Canada—study commissions have concluded that it is desirable to maintain the autonomous authority of the state or provincial governments. The reasons given included the training of the citizenry in democratic processes through state and local self-government, the greater opportunity under a federal system to adapt governmental policies to the needs of particular areas, and the deconcentration of power resulting from a federal system. (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica – 2003)

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