The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation: Annotations of Cases Decided by the Supreme Court of the United States to June 30, 1952
History
The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation: Annotations of Cases Decided by the Supreme Court of the United States to June 30, 1952
Constitutional law -- United States; Constitutions -- United States
What importance has the original package doctrine today as a restraint
on State legislation affecting interstate commerce? The answer is, very
little, if any. State laws prohibiting the importation of intoxicating
liquor, have since the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment
consistently been upheld, even when imposing a burden on interstate
commerce or discriminating against liquor imported from another
State.[940] Indeed the Court has, without appealing to the Twenty-first
Amendment, even gone so far as to uphold a statute requiring a permit
for transportation of liquor through the enacting State.[941] In
Whitfield _v._ Ohio,[942] moreover, the Court upheld a State law
prohibiting the sale in open market of convict-made goods including
sales of goods imported from other States and still in the original
package. While the decision is based on the Hawes-Cooper Act of
1929,[943] which follows the pattern of the Webb-Kenyon Act, Justice
Sutherland speaking for the Court, takes pains to disparage the
"unbroken-package doctrine, as applied to interstate commerce, * * *, as
more artificial than sound."[944] Indeed, earlier cases make it clear
that the enforcement of State quarantine and inspection acts, otherwise
constitutional, is not to be impeded by the doctrine in any way.[945]
CURBS ON THE INTERSTATE MOVEMENT OF PERSONS
Prior to the Civil War the slaveholding States, ever fearful of a slave
uprising, adopted legislation meant to exclude from their borders free
Negroes whether hailing from abroad or from sister States, and in 1823 a
South Carolina Negro Seamen's Act embodying this objective was held void
by Justice William Johnson, himself a South Carolinian, in a case
arising in the Carolina circuit and involving a colored British
sailor.[946] The basis of the ruling, which created tremendous uproar in
Charleston,[947] was the commerce clause and certain treaties of the
United States. There followed two rulings of Attorneys General, the
earlier by Attorney General Wirt, denouncing such legislation as
unconstitutional;[948] the latter by Attorney General Berrien,
sustaining it;[949] and in City of New York _v._ Miln[950] the Court,
speaking by Justice Barbour of Virginia, asserted, six years after Nat
Turner's rebellion, the power of the States to exclude undesirables in
sweeping terms, which in the Passenger Cases,[951] decided in 1840, a
narrowly divided Court considerably qualified. Shortly after the Civil
War the Court overturned a Nevada statute which sought to halt the
further loss of population by a special tax on railroads on every
passenger carried out of the State.[952] This time only two Justices
invoked the commerce clause; the majority, speaking by Justice Miller
held the measure to be an unconstitutional interference with a right of
national citizenship--a holding today translatable, in the terminology
of the Fourteenth Amendment, as an abridgment of a privilege or immunity
of citizens of the United States.
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