Federal enclaves

In United States law, a "federal enclave" is a parcel of federal property within a state that is under the "Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction of the United States." As of 1960, the year of the latest comprehensive inquiry, seven percent of federal property had enclave status, of which four percent (almost all in Alaska and Hawaii) was under "concurrent" state jurisdiction. The remaining three percent, on which some state laws do not apply, is scattered almost at random throughout the United States. In 1960, there were about 5,000 enclaves, with about one million people living on them. These numbers would undoubtedly be lower today because many of these areas were military bases that have been closed and transferred out of federal ownership.

Since late 1950s, it has been an official federal policy that the states should have full concurrent jurisdiction on all federal enclaves, an approach endorsed by legal experts.

Since the 1953 Howard v. Commissioners case the Supreme Court has held that the collection of city and state taxes from federal enclave residents is permissible, establishing the "Friction Not Fiction" doctrine.

Residents of federal enclaves have the right to vote in the elections of the state in which the federal enclave is situated. This is based on the "Friction Not Fiction" doctrine, and was challenged by a Maryland law in 1968, the subject of the case Evans v. Cornman. The case was decided by the Supreme Court in 1970, and overruled the Maryland law, upholding the voting rights of enclave residents and establishing that they should be regarded as residents of the state in question.

Federal enclaves are to be distinguished from federal territories and possessions administered under , which once included all the territory that has since become states, and still includes insular territories like Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and a few others. Historically, the Congress has not exercised a full array of state-like powers over such territories, but tried to organize them into self-governing entities, as was done with the Northwest Ordinance and the Southwest Ordinance.

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