Clark, Jane Perry

Jane Perry Clark (Carey) (September 16, 1898 – October 24, 1981) was a political scientist who taught international relations, American government, and constitutional law at Barnard College from 1929 to 1953. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.

She is best known to students of American federalism for her New Deal era book, The Rise of a New Federalism: Federal-State Cooperation in the United States. The book is dedicated to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo with whom she had a long-time friendship. The book’s main argument is “that the federal and state governments are not separate and rival agencies but that they are both necessary to handle the manifold problems of government today” (1938: ix). Clark examined informal federal-state cooperation; informal and formal agreements; interstate compacts; cooperative uses of federal, state, and local government personnel; legal and administrative interdependence; federal credits for state taxes; and federal grants-in-aid where she was alert to the possibility of federal coercion of state and local governments. Generally, she held that informal intergovernmental cooperation was more pervasive and effective than formal agreements and compacts. She also published articles on interstate compacts, dangers of emergency measures during the Great Depression, and welfare administration.

She published a review, as well, of Canada’s 1940 Rowell-Sirois commission report on dominion-provincial relations, which recommended strengthening powers, especially financial powers, of the federal government and instituting more dominion-provincial fiscal interdependence. These recommendations provoked “provincial rights” sentiments, leading Clark to contend that “Canadian federalism has developed more in common with American federalism than the propounders of the British North America Act of 1867 might have ever dreamed possible” (1941: 190).

Clark also served as an advisor to the U.S. Department of State on refugees and displaced persons in 1944-1946 and to the U.S. Military Government in Germany in 1948 and served as chief investigator in 1952 for a Canadian and United States survey of refugees for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Among other works, she wrote The Role of Uprooted People in European Recovery (1948) and Deportation of Aliens from the United States to Europe (Reprint 1969). With her husband, Andrew Galbraith Carey, she published articles on political and economic developments in Greece, Iran, Italy, Libya, Sweden, and Turkey and a book, The Web of Modern Greek Politics (1968).