Sovereignty is a concept that I had explored in my reading last year, and finally reached a satisfactory definition in "Enforcing International Law", back in November. It is essentially the ability of a legal body to administer "self-help" (in the legal sense) to issues that it is facing over a geographic territory it claims as its own. That definition, although clear, irked me somewhat.
The main problem was the federal-national-local split among government - of course, the idea of sovereignty as a legally clear and concise term makes as much sense as trying to map the Solar system using the Ptolemaic "perfect circle" system, but we make do with what we have. And what we have is a cluster-fuck of absolutely Mongolian proportions.
This book goes into the educational, fiscal, regulatory and similar discrepancies between the federal, state and local level particularly in the US. Everything from charter schools to foreign trade zones is covered, although not much explanation is given to the navigating of the troubled waters outlined herein. It's a perfectly decent descriptive book, but fails at the implementation level.
That said, it's more than useful to understand the confusion that governs what we think to be an orderly and reasonable system, and I'm glad that a book like this is out there. The explicitly political examinations are somewhat tedious, but this is overall a read that I'm happy to have gone over.
6/10