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Unit: $U54

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UNITED STATES v. MORRISON

Opinion of the Court

the Commerce Clause’s history here; it sufﬁces to say that,
in the years since NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.,
301 U. S. 1 (1937), Congress has had considerably greater
latitude in regulating conduct and transactions under the
Commerce Clause than our previous case law permitted.
See Lopez, 514 U. S., at 555–556; id., at 573–574 (Kennedy,
J., concurring).

Lopez emphasized, however, that even under our modern,
expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause, Con-
gress’ regulatory authority is not without effective bounds.
Id., at 557.

“[E]ven [our] modern-era precedents which have
expanded congressional power under the Commerce
Clause conﬁrm that this power is subject to outer limits.
In Jones & Laughlin Steel, the Court warned that the
scope of the interstate commerce power ‘must be con-
sidered in the light of our dual system of government
and may not be extended so as to embrace effects
upon interstate commerce so indirect and remote that
to embrace them, in view of our complex society, would
effectually obliterate the distinction between what is na-
tional and what is local and create a completely central-
ized government.’ ”
Id., at 556–557 (quoting Jones &
Laughlin Steel, supra, at 37).3

As we observed in Lopez, modern Commerce Clause juris-
prudence has “identiﬁed three broad categories of activity
that Congress may regulate under its commerce power.”

3 Justice Souter’s dissent takes us to task for allegedly abandon-
ing Jones & Laughlin Steel in favor of an inadequate “federalism of
some earlier time.” Post, at 641–643, 655. As the foregoing language
from Jones & Laughlin Steel makes clear however, this Court has always
recognized a limit on the commerce power inherent in “our dual system
of government.”
It is the dissent’s remarkable theory
that the commerce power is without judicially enforceable boundaries
that disregards the Court’s caution in Jones & Laughlin Steel against
allowing that power to “effectually obliterate the distinction between
what is national and what is local.”

301 U. S., at 37.

Ibid.