Federal Law and Southern Order, first published in 1987, examines the factors behind the federal government's long delay in responding to racial violence during the 1950s and 1960s. The book also reveals that it was apprehension of a militant minority of white racists that ultimately spurred acquiescent state and local officials in the South to protect blacks and others involved in civil rights activities. By tracing patterns of violent racial crimes and probing the federal government's persistent failure to punish those who committed the crimes, Michal R. Belknap tells how and why judges, presidents, members of Congress, and even Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials accepted the South's insistence that federalism precluded any national interference in southern law enforcement. Lulled into complacency by the soothing rationalization of federalism, Washington for too long remained a bystander while the Ku Klux Klan and others used violence to sabotage the civil rights movement, Belknap demonstrates. In the foreword to this paperback edition, Belknap examines how other scholars, in works published after Federal Law and Southern Order, have treated issues related to federal efforts to curb racial violence. He also explores how incidents of racial violence since the 1960s have been addressed by the state legal systems of the South and discusses the significance for the contemporary South of congressional legislation enacted during the 1960s to suppress racially motivated murders, beatings, and intimidation.

An examination of the laws of each state regarding civil rights, segregation, interracial marriage and other issues.

This collection on law and order documents the efforts of district attorneys from southern states to uphold federal laws in the states that fought in the Confederacy or were Border States. This publication includes their correspondence with the attorney general as well all other letters received by the attorney general from the states in question during that period, including the correspondence of marshals, judges, convicts, and concerned or aggrieved citizens.

A treatise on the law of federal enclaves, i.e., United States exclusive legislative jurisdiction over special territorial areas within the States, such as military bases, courthouses, national forests, and national parks. The book also discusses the Supremacy Clause,the Assimilative Crimes Act, the Posse Comitatus Act, wage and hour laws and right to work laws.

Preemption is a doctrine of American constitutional law, under which states and local governments are deprived of their power to act in a given area, whether or not the state or local law, rule or action is in direct conflict with federal law. This book covers not only the basics of preemption but also focuses on such topics as federal mechanisms for agency preemption, implied forms of preemption, and defensive use of federal preemption in civil litigation.