Police Power

The police power may be one of the most important and yet least understood of the powers of government. As the most open-ended of the fundamental government powers, the police power is the main source of state authority to regulate people, places, and things. Very few principles are taken for granted in law, but one of them is that all sovereign states and nations inherently have the police power. The police power is thus one of the powers reserved for the states under the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Only the states can regulate under the police power. In turn, however, the states' exercise of those police powers may be limited by prohibitions in the Constitution of the United States. The police power is wide and expansive, and thus its scope is sometimes difficult to define, but it is not an unlimited power.