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14 

NATIONAL PORK PRODUCERS COUNCIL v. ROSS 

Opinion of the Court 

this Court has long consulted original and historical under-
standings of the Constitution’s structure and the principles
of  “sovereignty  and  comity”  it  embraces.    BMW  of  North 
America, Inc. v. Gore, 517 U. S. 559, 572 (1996).  This Court 
has invoked as well a number of the Constitution’s express
provisions—including “the Due Process Clause and the Full 
Faith and Credit Clause.”  Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Shutts, 
472 U. S. 797, 818 (1985).  The antidiscrimination principle 
found in our dormant Commerce Clause cases may well rep-
resent one more effort to mediate competing claims of sov-
ereign authority under our horizontal separation of powers. 
But  none  of  this  means,  as  petitioners  suppose,  that  any
question about the ability of a State to project its power ex-
traterritorially must yield to an “almost per se” rule under 
the dormant Commerce Clause.  This Court has never be-
fore claimed so much “ground for judicial supremacy under 
the  banner  of  the  dormant  Commerce  Clause.”    United 
Haulers Assn., Inc. v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Man-
agement  Authority,  550  U. S.  330,  347  (2007).    We  see  no 
reason to change course now.1 

—————— 

1 Beyond Baldwin, Brown-Forman, and Healy, petitioners point to Ed-
gar v. MITE Corp., 457 U. S. 624 (1982), as authority for the “almost per 
se” rule they propose.  Invoking the dormant Commerce Clause, a plural-
ity in that case declined to enforce an Illinois securities law that “directly
regulate[d] transactions which [took] place . . . wholly outside the State”
and  involved  individuals  “having  no  connection  with  Illinois.”  Id.,  at 
641–643 (emphasis added).  Some have questioned whether the state law 
at issue in Edgar posed a dormant Commerce Clause question as much 
as one testing the territorial limits of state authority under the Consti-
tution’s  horizontal  separation  of  powers.    See,  e.g.,  D.  Regan,  Siamese 
Essays: (I) CTS Corp. v. Dynamics Corp. of America and Dormant Com-
merce Clause Doctrine; (II) Extraterritorial State Legislation, 85 Mich. 
L. Rev. 1865, 1875–1880, 1897–1902 (1987); cf. Shelby County v. Holder, 
570  U. S.  529,  535  (2013)  (“[A]ll  States  enjoy  equal  sovereignty”).   But 
either way, the Edgar plurality opinion does not support the rule peti-
tioners propose.  That decision spoke to a law that directly regulated out-