Is there a requirement on how small a state can be ?

Question

Is there a requirement on how small a state can be in terms of area or population. Could we have a state that is the area of a medium city or a population of 50,000 or is there a requirement that a state must be atleast so and so amount of area or so and so population.

Answer 1

no

Answer 2

There are no such requirements in the Constitution.  The Constitution is rather laconic on the process by which new states can be added, noting only that "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union", and forbidding a new state to be created out of the territory of an existing state or the merging of two or more states as one without the consent of both Congress and all the state legislatures involved.

Answer 3

esther is right.

i jsut read the first hand materials by james madison from the 1787 constitutional convention about a week or so ago.

there was much, much discussion about the relative powers of small vs large states, that is in part how the idea of 2 houses of congress came about - it was a compromise between all states being represented by virtue of being a state (as in the senate, good for small states) and being represented in proportion to size, in this case population was decided on.

one of the last minute details compromised on was that house representatives would be 1 per 30,000 population instead of the long agreed upon 1 in 40,000. This helped the small states increase their representation slightly by changing the rounding in some cases.

as for specific size or minimum population, the constitution is silent.

later, congress did require that western territories have a minimum population *density* (people per square mile) to be eligible to be a state.

with those requirements, it is perhaps surprising that OK was the last of the lower 48 to qualify. It must have been strange to have a kind of donut hole in the middle of the country for a while.

Answer 4

The original thirteen states were created directly from the original colonies and the size was based on the old royal charter for the most part. The later states mostly started as territories and their size was based on geographic features like rivers and mountains and lines of latitude. Bigger territories were split in half so they wouldn't be too big.