Court Opinion

ID: 9841906
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-22 20:10:53.366073+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:06:07.245441
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Clarke,
dissenting.
The indictment in this case charges that the defendant, being in the City of Cheyenne, Wyoming, “bought, paid for and owned” five quarts of whiskey and thereafter, in his own automobile, driven by himself, transported it into the City of Denver, Colorado, intending to there devote it to his own personal use. Colorado prohibited the manu*468facture and sale therein of intoxicating liquor for beverage purposes. The court decides that this liquor was unlawfully “transported in interstate commerce,” from Wyoming into Colorado within the meaning of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1917 (39 Stat. 1069).
With this conclusion I cannot agree.
By early (Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 193) and by recent decisions (Second Employers’ Liability Cases, 223 U. S. 1, 46) of this court and by the latest authoritative dictionaries, interstate commerce, in the constitutional sense, is defined to mean commercial, business, intercourse — including the transportation of passengers and property — carried on between the inhabitants of two or more of the United States, — especially (we are dealing here with property) the exchange, buying or selling of commodities, of merchandise, on a large scale between the inhabitants of different States. The liquor involved in this case, after it was purchased and while it'was being held for the personal use of the defendant, was, certainly, withdrawn from trade or commerce as thus defined — it was no longer in the channels of commerce, of trade or of business of any kind — and when it was carried by its owner, for his personal use, across a state line, in my judgment it was not moved or transported in interstate commerce, within the scope of the act of Congress relied upon or of any legislation which Congress had the constitutional power to enact with respect to it at the time the Reed Amendment was approved. The grant of power to Congress is over commerce, — not over isolated movements of small -amounts of private property, by private persons for their personal use.
I think the Hill Case, 248 U. S. 420, was wrongly decided and that the judgment of the District Court in this case should be affirtned.