JUPITER, Fla. — Almost a century ago, in a famous Supreme Court dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis provided an enduring definition of the role of states in the American political system. They were, in a metaphor contained in his 1932 minority opinion in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, laboratories of democracy.
The Brandeis commentary spoke about "one of the happy incidents of the federal system," one that permits states to "try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." The states have led the way in innovations in women's rights, consumer regulation and, in Massachusetts and Arizona among many others, health care, and the "laboratory" notion has been quoted in three dozen Supreme Court cases.
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