Laboratories of democracy is a concept that defines the system of federalism within the United States. This concept explains how within the federal framework, there exists a system of filtration of governments. Within this filtration, state and local governments act as “laboratories,” where law is created and enacted from the lowest level of the democratic system, up to the top level.
The Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution makes all “powers not delegated by the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This is a basis for the laboratories of democracy concept, because the Tenth Amendment hands a number of responsibilities down to the state and local governments. Policy is experimented on the state level first, before it is on the national level, and because these governments are only tied together by the federal level government, a diverse patchwork of lower government practices is created.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis popularized the concept, in his dissenting opinion in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann 285 U.S. 262 (1932),[1] in which he stated that "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."