US Constitution, Article VI: the supreme law

Lawyers call this passage the supremacy clause. It makes the Constitution, federal statutes and treaties binding on judges in every state, whatever state law says. The same article promises that debts contracted under the Confederation stay valid, and it ends by ruling out any religious test for federal office. Article VI is one of the shortest articles in the document.

Where this text comes fromRead closely, the clause does not address legislatures at all. It speaks to judges, and specifically to judges in every state, telling them which law to apply when two conflict. That choice of audience is the whole mechanism: the drafters could not stop a state from passing a law, so they aimed at the courtroom where that law would have to be enforced. The copy linked below is the House of Representatives text, which keeps the capitalization of 1787 rather than modernizing it.

What you might not noticeThe clause binds judges in every state, and the 1787 text says so in the phrase any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding, capitalizing Thing and Contrary along with everything else it considers important. Source

What it trainsSixty-four words, one sentence, one full stop at the very end. Two semicolons carry the whole structure, and if you lose the thread after the first one there is nothing to bring you back. Seventeen of the eighteen capital letters sit inside the sentence, heavy but not the heaviest here: the apportionment clause on this shelf runs twenty-eight capitals inside a single sentence. Five commas are all the further help you get. The word to watch is notwithstanding: fifteen letters, no hyphen, no break, arriving right at the end when attention has already dropped, and it is the only word here that most people have never typed before.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource