Voting with Your Feet is No Substitute for Constitutional Rights (Twenty-Seventh Annual National Federalist Society Student Symposium‪)‬

I. THE DOWNSIDE OF VOTING WITH YOUR FEET The organizers of this Symposium (1) gave each panel a brief summary of the panel's intended topic. I want to take a part of that summary as the subject of my commentary: "It is a benefit of Federalism that people can vote with their feet and migrate to communities that share their values as well as enable their liberty. But does pervasive judicial review threaten to destroy local identity by homogenizing community norms?" (2) There follows some more in that vein, some illustrative examples, and finally the provocative question whether the Constitution really requires a separation of God and football. (3) I will return to God and football, but I principally want to address this idea of voting with your feet. The idea is common in the federalism literature, (4) but it has always troubled me. (5)