What makes a Commonwealth state different from any other state in the US?
I think this will answer your question. http://ask.yahoo.com/20001117.html What is the difference between a state and a commonwealth? A search on “state difference commonwealth” turned up some useful results. At the About.com: Lawyers site, we learned that there are four commonwealths in the United States: Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky. The difference between these commonwealths and the other 46 states is in name alone — they elected to call themselves commonwealths, a term drawn from political theory. The About.com lawyer assured us that, legally, there is no difference between a state and these four commonwealths. There is, however, another form of commonwealth. The ever-helpful Dictionary.com offers this alternate definition: a “self-governing, autonomous political unit voluntarily associated with the United States, namely, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands.” The degree of that dependency varies from plac
