Fun With the Constitution
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James Joyner | Wednesday, November 29, 2006 |
Xlrq, a lawyer with a hard-to-pronounce name and too much time on his hands, examines the legal ramifications of parent-child labor relations vis-a-vis minimum wage laws, income tax withholding, and the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude. In a separate post, he considers whether the District of Columbia is in violation of the Constitution’s requirement that it be 10 miles square, noting that its land mass is 68.3 square miles and its shape ceased to be square with the retrocession of Old Town Alexandria and Fairfax Arlington County to Virginia in 1847.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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I think you meant Arlington County, and not Fairfax County? Arlington is that missing corner of the square that was returned to VA.
As an Arlington County, VA resident, I must point out that the retrocession was of Alexandria and Arlington County, not Fairfax County. This is very evident when you view a map of DC/NoVA and see how Alexandria/Arlington complete the square on the VA side of the Potomac River.
DCL/Tim: You're right. I knew that, really! What I get for posting in the middle of the night with insomnia!
For those not familiar with the very unusual political arrangements in Virginia it may be the only state with only two levels of government.
In VA you are either in a county or a town(city)
but the town or city is never in a county.
The typical arrangement is for 3 levels of government with towns and/or cities also being in a county.
spencer: Yep, it's not like anything I'd seen before. What's especially amusing is that there is the City of Alexandria (aka Old Town Alexandria) and then there is the large part of Alexandria that is in Fairfax County but not part of the City. Quite strange, really.
Spencer, that's close but not quite right. Cities are not inside counties, but towns are. I'm only aware of two other independent cities in the U.S., Baltimore, MD and Carson City, NV, though any distinction between independent cities and the consolidated City and County of San Francisco is arguably a matter of semantics.
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