Symposium Introduction: Marijuana, Federal Power & The State

The insistence of multiple states on experimenting with various levels of marijuana decriminalization or legalization raises a host of important and difficult legal questions. To explore these questions, and the emerging landscape of marijuana law and policy, the Center for Business Law & Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law hosted an interdisciplinary conference on Marijuana, Federal Power & the States in September 2014. The papers from this conference are contained in this issue and address a range of constitutional, regulatory, and policy issues raised by the conflict between federal marijuana prohibition and recent state-level marijuana reforms. The focus of these papers is not whether marijuana should or should not be legal, whether for medical or recreational purposes. Rather, these papers focus on the legal and policy questions raised by the fact that federal and state marijuana laws conflict