Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 1993 The Item Veto in State Courts Richard Briffault Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, and the President/Executive Department Commons Recommended Citation Richard Briffault, The Item Veto in State Courts, 66 TEMPLE L. REV. 1171 (1993). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/933 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE ITEM VETO IN STATE COURTS Richard Briffault * Contemporary debates about state constitutional law have concentrated on the role of state constitutions in the protection of individual rights and have paid less attention to the state constitutional law of government structure.' This is ironic since the emergence of a state jurisprudence of individual rights has been hampered by the similarity of the texts of the state and federal constitutional provisions concerning individual rights, whereas many state constitutional pro- visions dealing with government structure have no federal analogues, and thus state jurisprudence in this area is free to develop outside the dominating shadow of the Federal Constitution and the federal courts. Moreover, as the "laborato- ries of democracy" metaphor suggests, the study of the structural features of state constitutions can enable us to consider alternative means of organizing rep- resentative democratic governments, assess the efficacy of different mechanisms for governing, and illuminate the implications and consequences of aspects of the federal government's structure that we ordinarily take for granted.