hey this is kim from khan academy and today i'm learning about article 4 of the u.s 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 holly can you take us a little bit through why the framers included article for what was its purpose the founders of the constitution were very concerned that the federal government be one of limited powers and 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 as to the detriment of the union so article 4 is also sort of key to making sure that the states act sort of as a unified whole rather than than going it alone it's one country made up of diverse states and if you uh prefer the way things are done in nevada uh you can move there and if you think that some other state has a better set of answers to uh 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 uh 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 the you know three branches and their checks and balances but we also have a strong central government uh that's checked in large part by strong uh independent sovereign governments in each of the 50 states and these states traditionally have what are known as police powers so they have a lot of inherent authority to govern uh the people in those states um subject to federal law uh but it really does sort of place a check on uh 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 new constitution and new federal government there are four sections in article four 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 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 eat 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 so the privileges and immunities clauses has been one that's subject uh to a number of uh sort of debate uh in the courts uh in the academic literature uh but basically privileges and immunities have been construed to be those sorts of things uh 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 the depression there was an effort by some states to limit the 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 versus roe and what that case was about is that california had relatively generous welfare benefits and california wanted to uh 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 communities 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 so that is one of the most unfortunate probably the most unfortunate clauses in our constitution it's known as the fugitive slave clause and that title is 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 uh this clause gave the owner the right uh to reclaim uh and that slave and put them back uh 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 slavery the word isn't used in the constitution they only use these euphemisms these sort of complicated circumlocutions and 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 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 so 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 so 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 so basically the process was uh that a territory would indicate the congress that it wished to become a state uh then they would submit a constitution uh and congress would approve the new state uh but the constitution itself and article four places some limitations on that um some of the eastern states were concerned that the large western territories might become too influential uh 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 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 uh 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 an article for 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 and 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 it leaves the details to the states but the basic idea is that there has to the the the concept of republican government that's embodied in article four is majority rule that 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 that generation after generation will lead us and they will be the 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 iv visit the national constitution center's interactive constitution and khan academy's resources on u.s government and politics