Tenth Amendment | Contents & Supreme Court Interpretations (2024)

Tenth Amendment, amendment (1791) to the Constitution of the United States, part of the Bill of Rights, providing the powers “reserved” to the states.

The full text of the Amendment is:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The final of the 10 amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights, the Tenth Amendment was inserted into the Constitution largely to relieve tension and to assuage the fears of states’ rights advocates, who believed that the newly adopted Constitution would enable the federal government to run roughshod over the states and their citizens. While the Federalists, who advocated a strong central government, had in that respect prevailed with the ratification of the Constitution, it was essential to the integrity of the document and to the stability of the fledgling country to acknowledge the interests of the Anti-Federalists, such as Patrick Henry, who had unsuccessfully opposed the strong central government created by the Constitution.

Whereas the Ninth Amendment provides that the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution does not deny or disparage other unenumerated rights retained by the people, the Tenth Amendment clearly reserves to the states those powers that the Constitution neither delegates to the federal government nor prohibits to the states. The Tenth Amendment does not impose any specific limitations on the authority of the federal government; though there had been an attempt to do so, Congress defeated a motion to modify the word delegated with expressly in the amendment. It thus does not grant states additional powers, nor does it alter the relationship that exists between the federal government and the states. It merely indicates that the states may establish and maintain their own laws and policies so long as they do not conflict with the authority of the federal government.

In a test of the Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause (Article I, Section 8, paragraph 18) against the Tenth Amendment, in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion that the federal government was not prohibited from exercising only those powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution:

Even the 10th Amendment, which was framed for the purpose of quieting the excessive jealousies which had been excited, omits the word “expressly,” and declares only that the powers “not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people,” thus leaving the question whether the particular power which may become the subject of contest has been delegated to the one Government, or prohibited to the other, to depend on a fair construction of the whole instrument. The men who drew and adopted this amendment had experienced the embarrassments resulting from the insertion of this word in the Articles of Confederation, and probably omitted it to avoid those embarrassments.

From the death of Marshall until the 1930s and particularly since the mid-1980s, however, the Supreme Court has often used the Tenth Amendment to limit the authority of the federal government, particularly with regard to regulating commerce and with regard to taxation, but has generally stood firm on the supremacy of the national government and the U.S. Constitution. In contemporary political debate, conservatives often point to the Tenth Amendment as a means of arguing in favour of restrictions on federal authority.