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We consider here only a few of many problems involved in this crucial federal-state relationship.

The first is that enforcement of national law in state litigation raises in reverse the old diversity puzzle of the relation of procedure to substance.

Subject to certain constitutional restraints in favor of fair trials, each level of government is free to devise its own judicial procedures.

Litigants who choose to assert federal claims in a state court go into that court subject to its rules of procedure.

A similar canon applies to those who press state claims in federal tribunals, e.g., in diversity cases.

In an FELA controversy the state court followed established state procedure by construing a vague complaint `` most strongly against '' the complainant.

In other words the burden of pleading clearly rested upon the pleader by state law.

The result was that the plaintiff's case was dismissed.

Mr. Justice Black led a reversing majority: `` Strict local rules of pleading cannot be used to impose unnecessary burdens upon rights of recovery authorized by federal law ''.

Here, as in the Byrd case, another element of state procedure was subsumed to federal judge-made law.

Justices Frankfurter and Jackson dissented: `` One State may cherish formalities more than another, one State may be more responsive than another to procedural reforms.

If a litigant chooses to enforce a Federal right in a State court, he cannot be heard to object if he is treated exactly as are plaintiffs who press like claims arising under State law with regard to the form in which the claim must be stated -- the particularity, for instance, with which a cause of action must be described.

Federal law, though invoked in a State court, delimits the Federal claim -- defines what gives a right to recovery and what goes to prove it.

But the form in which the claim must be stated need not be different from what the State exacts in the enforcement of like obligations created by it, so long as a requirement does not add to, or diminish, the right as defined by Federal law, nor burden the realization of this right in the actualities of litigation ''.