American regulation moved historically from local to state to federal control

Evidence

The great arc of regulation moves, then, from the local to the state, to the national level. In welfare, for example, first came local poor laws, and local overseers of the poor. Then came statewide systems. When the states could no longer handle the job (much later, to be sure), the federal government stepped in. This was during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Railroad regulation reached its federal stage in 1887. Elementary education, on the other hand, only crossed the federal threshold in the 1960s, and rather timidly at that. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2547

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the Grafting & Growth / colonialism threads as well as the legal polyad’s institutional narrative — the arc from local to national jurisdiction is the institutional skeleton every course text sits inside.
• XREF: connects to: States retain authority to regulate noise through use restrictions beyond product emission limits — United States Congress (Pub. L. No. 92-574, 86 Stat. 1234), Noise Control Act of 1972, 76; Interstate commerce defeated state-by-state pure food regulation, pushing federal law — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 987; 1970s resource laws shifted federal oversight of western public lands toward conservation. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 428 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• A national market economy inherently generates demand for national-level regulation #expands (0.82) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4193