![handle is hein.journals/sjel11 and id is 1 raw text is: Fault Lines: An Empirical Legal Study of California
Secession
Bill Tomlinsont and Andrew W. Torrancei
I. INTRODUCTION
On March 15, 2020,1 and again on April 7, 2020,2 California
Governor Gavin Newsom referred to California as a nation state.3 These
references caused various news sources, including The New York Times,4
to explore possible intimations that California could secede from the
United States (U.S.) and become a sovereign country. While no such
secession is currently under serious consideration, California secession
has a long history and may become more relevant as the coming decades
unfold.s
This paper discusses an array of legal issues surrounding
California secession and offers empirical data about public perceptions of
California secession.
f Professor of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of
California, Irvine.
tt Paul E. Wilson Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Kansas; Visiting Scientist, MIT Sloan
School of Management.
'Gavin Newsom, California Coronavirus Update - March 15, 2020, FACEBOOK, at 34:00 (Mar. 15,
2020), https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=1104540316564722 [https://perma.cc/DVX2-
EDYT].
2 Gov. Newsom TRANSCRIPT: 4/7/20, The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC (Apr. 7, 2020, 9:00
PM), http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/rachel-maddow-show/2020-04-07 [https://perma.cc/J2TH-
7AWR].
3Id. Henry Brady, dean of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, calls it very compli-
cated whether California is, in fact, a nation state. Henry Brady, Is California a Nation-State?,
BERKELEY BLOG (Apr. 17, 2020), https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2020/04/17/is-california-a-nation-state/
[https://perma.cc/HU2R-5MWY].
'Jill Cowan, Is California a Nation-State?, N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 14, 2020), https://www.ny-
times.com/2020/04/14/us/california-coronavirus-newsom-nation-state.html [https://perma.cc/6HTH-
6VVU].
5 The authors do not advocate independence for California or any other state. Rather, they find the
topic of scholarly interest, especially in light of current global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and attendant
economic crisis, and amenable to empirical study due to the ability technology now provides to
gather a diversity of views about secession.
1](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/sjel11&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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