Article IV of the Constitution | National Constitution Center | Khan Academy

Hey, this is Kim from Khan Academy and today I'm learning about Article 4 of the US Constitution. Article 4 lays out the nuts and bolts of how federalism—the system of shared governance between states and the federal government—works in practice. Article 4 has four sections. The first two, the Full Faith and Credit Clause and the Privileges and Immunities Clause, talk about how states will treat each other's citizens as well as they treat the citizens of their own states.

Then the third section is an admissions clause discussing how new states will be added to the Union, and the fourth section is the Guarantee Clause, which guarantees every state in the Union a republican form of government. To learn more about Article 4, I sought out the help of two experts. Aaron Hawley is an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri. Her scholarship focuses on the federal courts, and she teaches constitutional litigation, tax policy, and agricultural law. Professor Gabriel Chin is the director of clinical legal education at the UC Davis School of Law. He's a teacher and scholar of immigration law, criminal procedure, and race and law.

So, Professor Hawley, can you take us a little bit through why the Framers included Article 4? What was its purpose?

"The founders of the Constitution were very concerned that the federal government be one of limited powers. Because of that, they saw the states as having an active and critical role in placing a check on the federal government. So, we've got the three branches and their own checks and balances, and then we've got the federal government and the state government also playing a role in checking and balancing each other. They wanted to establish a strong central government but also to ensure that it didn't have too much power, and the states were critical to this effort.

Also, they very much wanted the states to act collectively, not individually. As you'll recall, the states had not been doing so well under the loose articles of the Confederation; they'd sort of been going it alone on critical issues like trade and defense, to the detriment of the Union. So, Article 4 is also sort of key to making sure that states act sort of as a unified whole rather than going it alone. It's one country made up of diverse states, and if you prefer the way things are done in Nevada, you can move there. If you think that some other state has a better set of answers to the problems of modern life, you can move.

What the Full Faith and Credit Clause and the Privileges and Immunities Clause are designed to do is to facilitate transactions, to facilitate moving, to facilitate communications and commerce and trade and travel among the states. But that doesn't mean that what's going on in each of the states can't be very, very different. We often think of checks and balances as being something that was designed to be kind of horizontal, that the legislature and the executive branch and the judicial branch kind of all at the same level checking each other. But there's also kind of this vertical checks and balances happening too between the power of the federal government, the power of the states, and the power of the local governments."

Absolutely, so we've got the three branches and their checks and balances, but we also have a strong central government that's checked in large part by strong independent sovereign governments in each of the 50 states. These states traditionally have what are known as police powers, so they have a lot of inherent authority to govern the people in those states, subject to federal law. But it really does sort of place a check on federal authority, and I think this is precisely what the Framers wanted because they did want a strong government, but they also were very much of the view that states were important, that their own states were important, and they didn't want to lose that in the new constitution and new federal government.

There are four sections in Article 4, and the first section deals with Full Faith and Credit. It says, 'Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.' So, what does Full Faith and Credit actually mean?

"It's designed to make, in a certain sense, all of the states of the United States part of a single system. And so, Full Faith and Credit means that a court judgment, for example, in one state will be recognized in every state. So if you have a valid judgment in New York, for example, and you move to California, the California courts are required to give effect to that judgment, to that state court judgment, so long as it was validly issued.

There was a federal statute known as the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, that was passed under President Clinton, and recently the Supreme Court struck that down as unconstitutional. So now, under Full Faith and Credit, if you're married in one state, you're married in another state as well. You can see the kinds of problems that would exist if states didn't honor the legal decisions that were made by other states, such as who's married, or who's divorced, or who owns a particular piece of property, or whether a particular child is going to be in the custody of one parent rather than another. And the Full Faith and Credit Clause is designed to say, in order for our system to work as a unified whole, while it's true that the courts of Georgia are distinct from the courts of New York, etc., they're separate systems, but they have to treat the work that each other does with respect."

If we move on to Section Two, this says that 'the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.' So, what are these privileges and immunities?

"The Privileges and Immunities Clauses have been subject to a number of debates in the courts and in the academic literature. But basically, privileges and immunities have been construed to be those sorts of things that would go with citizenship. So the right to travel, for example, is a privilege and immunity. Those sorts of things, occasionally in American history, there have been moments where states didn't want to let citizens of other states come through.

So during the Depression, there was an effort by some states to limit the migration of people from out of state to in-state, and the Supreme Court said that's not permissible. It also protects the right to travel. In 1999, the Supreme Court dealt with a case called Signs v. Roe, and what that case was about is that California had relatively generous welfare benefits. California wanted to set up its law in such a way that it wouldn't encourage people from other states to move to California just to get the welfare benefits.

So what they did is they said that if you don't live in California, if you're moving from out of state and you apply for welfare benefits, then we're going to give you the welfare benefits that you would have gotten in your state for the first year. We're not going to give you the higher California benefits; we're going to give you whatever you would have gotten where you came from. That's unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court said that violates the Privileges and Immunities Clause. We're one country, one nation; people are allowed to cross the borders whenever they want."

Interesting, but there's this second part of it that says, 'no person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof escaping into another shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from service or labor.' So what is that all about?

"That is one of the most unfortunate, probably the most unfortunate clause in our Constitution. It's known as the Fugitive Slave Clause, and that title is pretty descriptive. So if you have a slave who is validly owned, as it were in those days under one state's law, and that person escaped to a free state, this clause gave the owner the right to reclaim that slave and put them back into sort of ownership in their own state.

It is a sneaky way of talking about slavery, and this compromise with slavery was necessary to create the United States. The word 'slavery' isn't used in the Constitution; they only use these euphemisms, these sort of complicated circumlocutions. There's an argument that there's a reason for that, and the reason for that is that a lot of the Framers of the Constitution didn't support slavery, opposed slavery. They did think that it was important to have a United States and to have a Constitution, so they wanted to do what was necessary to achieve that, but they did the absolute minimum, and they did it in such a way that consciously doesn't recognize and legitimize the institution of slavery."

All right, so then we get into new states and territories. I think it was very forward-looking of the Framers to recognize that new states might want to join the Union and then to provide a process for that. So can you tell us a little bit about what that process was like?

"Article 4, Section 3, Clause 1 provides the process for admitting new states. Again, it recognizes that new states might want to join the Union, and it gives a wide latitude to Congress for admitting new states. So basically, the process was that a territory would indicate to Congress that it wished to become a state; then they would submit a constitution, and Congress would approve the new state.

But the Constitution itself and Article 4 place some limitations on that. Some of the eastern states were concerned that the large western territories might become too influential, so they had a couple of provisions: that no new state could be created out of an old state, nor could parts of states be combined to form a new state unless there was consent from all of the involved states. And it's not so clear that that purchase of territory from foreign governments was a power that was granted in the Constitution to anyone.

Thomas Jefferson, who was the president at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, had doubts that the Louisiana Purchase was constitutional. He thought that it was a great idea to purchase all that land from France, but he thought that it would require a constitutional amendment for the United States to have that power. This is different from Texas joining the Union, but the House and the Senate didn't have the same qualms that President Jefferson did, and so they agreed to approve the Louisiana Purchase and to fund it. When the bill got to Thomas Jefferson's desk, he signed it."

Moving on to Section Four, there's this promise here that the federal government will guarantee every state a republican form of government and shall protect each of them against invasion or domestic violence. What does this mean?

"So we see here, in Article 4, at the end of Article 4, a really sort of famous and important promise to each of the individual states. The federal government is promising to basically aid them in keeping a republican form of government. As we'll remember, Benjamin Franklin famously said, 'We've given you a republic, if you can keep it.'

So when we talk about invasion, when Section 4 talks about invasion, it's pretty clear that what they're talking about is invasion by some hostile state. And, of course, during this period, there was continuing conflict with England. The idea is that if New York or South Carolina gets invaded by England, that's not just that particular state's problem; it's the nation's problem, and the national government has an obligation to protect against invasion.

And I imagine it also prevents someone from, for example, declaring themselves the king of Maryland. The republican form of government clause does that. It leaves the details to the states, but the basic idea is that there has to be the concept of republican government. That's embodied in Article 4, majority rule. Even if there were free and fair elections, the state could not choose to have military or hereditary government. So even if everybody in California got together and said, 'You know what, we really need is a good family that generation after generation will lead us, and they will be the kings and queens of California, and this is what we want, and so we're going to amend our constitution to provide for hereditary leadership in our state, and we're going to find somebody great, and this is what we want to do,' Article 4 would say we can't choose to do that, even through democratic means."

So, as we've learned, Article 4 requires states to give Full Faith and Credit to the legal proceedings of other states and to treat the citizens of other states as well as they treat their own citizens. It provides a process for adding new states into the mix and guarantees a republican form of government to the citizens of all the states. Article 4 binds the United States together, so it's not just a collection of independent states but rather a unified nation. To learn more about Article 4, visit the National Constitution Center's interactive Constitution and Khan Academy's resources on U.S. government and politics.