The Articles of Confederation
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from justice. It sometimes occurs that a convicted felon or individual
charged with a serious offense will escape to a foreign country. The country to which this person has fled is not obliged under the law of nations,
however, to turn the individual over to the country from which he fled,
even if requested. For this reason, arrangements between nations for the
extradition of fugitives are made through treaties. Such is the manner in
which this problem was handled under the Articles of Confederation,
making extradition a legal obligation.
Finally, Article IV provided that ‘‘Full faith and credit shall be given in
each of these States to the records, acts and judicial proceedings of the
courts and magistrates of every other State.’’ This meant that each State
court was legally obligated to recognize the statutes and judicial decisions of other States, as is customary under what is called private international law or the ‘‘conflict of laws.’’ Thus, in a case of contracts, the
laws of a foreign country where the contract was made must govern. Article IV simply applied this principle of international law to the States of
the confederacy.
All of these provisions, it should be noted, were carried over, in slightly
different wording, to the Constitution of 1787. They were deemed essential
because the several States were not legally obligated to recognize or enforce the rights protected. They assumed, in other words, that the States,
in their quasi-international relationship with each other, were sovereign
entities, and that it would be necessary, therefore, to establish these rights
by agreement.
Although the several States, it may be seen, were treated under the
Articles as sovereign powers, a heated debate would rage for nearly a
century over the issue of whether the States, at the time they entered the
confederacy, retained all the attributes of sovereignty. That they voluntarily surrendered certain powers to the confederate government is abundantly clear from a reading of the Articles, and there can be no question
that in a real or practical sense they did not possess all of the sovereignty
that is enjoyed by an independent nation. But did their voluntary renunciation of certain powers constitute a permanent transfer of power,
thereby terminating or substantially reducing their legal sovereignty?
This question became critical after the Constitution was adopted, for one
of the major premises of the States’ Rights theory of the nature of the un-