Abstract
This paper promotes a comparative analysis of American and Brazilian models of federalism assuming their levels of political centralization as main criterion. The central problem faced herein is the Brazilian approach of Unitarian regime. The confrontation starts from the selection of the three most paradigmatic precedents of the recent U.S. Supreme Court’s concerns over federalism and continues bringing its practical controversies to the Brazilian normative context. The hypothesis holds that the amount of alternative criteria of federalization, and the way they are upheld on judicial review, are crucial to understand the levels of political centralization achieved in each model. The aim of this work is rather indicate how jurisdictional federalism found in United States can preserve a consistent model, with States robustly autonomous, than only argue the more centralized character of Brazilian formal federalism.
Constitutional design; federalism; U.S. Supreme Court; commerce clause; legislative authority