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529US3

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UNITED STATES v. MORRISON

Souter, J., dissenting

Wickard, however,
it had certainly been no less obvious
that “mining” practices could substantially affect commerce,
even though Carter Coal Co., supra, had held mining regu-
lation beyond the national commerce power. When we try
to fathom the difference between the two cases, it is clear
that they did not go in different directions because the
Carter Coal Court could not understand a causal connection
that the Wickard Court could grasp; the difference, rather,
turned on the fact that the Court in Carter Coal had a
reason for trying to maintain its categorical, formalistic
distinction, while that reason had been abandoned by the
time Wickard was decided. The reason was laissez-faire
economics, the point of which was to keep government in-
terference to a minimum. See Lopez, supra, at 605–606
(Souter, J., dissenting). The Court in Carter Coal was
still trying to create a laissez-faire world out of the 20th-
century economy, and formalistic commercial distinctions
were thought to be useful instruments in achieving that ob-
ject. The Court in Wickard knew it could not do any such
thing and in the aftermath of the New Deal had long since
stopped attempting the impossible. Without the animating
economic theory, there was no point in contriving formal-
isms in a war with Chief Justice Marshall’s conception of the
commerce power.

If we now ask why the formalistic economic/noneconomic
distinction might matter today, after its rejection in Wick-
ard, the answer is not that the majority fails to see causal
connections in an integrated economic world. The answer
is that in the minds of the majority there is a new animating
theory that makes categorical formalism seem useful again.
Just as the old formalism had value in the service of an
in serving a
economic conception, the new one is useful
conception of federalism.
It is the instrument by which
assertions of national power are to be limited in favor of
preserving a supposedly discernible, proper sphere of state
autonomy to legislate or refrain from legislating as the in-