Court Opinion

ID: 9419606
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:50:25.413867+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:19.350139
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring.
The Twenty-first Amendment made a fundamental change, as to control of the liquor traffic, in the constitutional relations between the States and national authority. Before that Amendment — disregarding the interlude of the Eighteenth Amendment — alcohol was for constitutional purposes treated in the abstract as an article of commerce just like peanuts and potatoes. As a result, the power of the States to control the liquor traffic was subordinated to the right of free trade across state lines as embodied in the Commerce Clause. The Twenty-first Amendment reversed this legal situation by subordinating rights under the Commerce Clause to the power of a State to control, and to control effectively, the traffic in liquor within its borders. The course of legal history which made necessary the Twenty-first Amendment in order to permit the States to control the liquor traffic, according to their notions of policy freed, from the restrictions upon state power which the Commerce Clause implies as to ordinary articles of commerce, was summarized in my concurring opinion in Carter v. Virginia, 321 U. S. 131, 139.
As a matter of constitutional law, the result of the Twenty-first Amendment is that a State may erect any barrier it pleases to the entry of intoxicating liquors. Its barrier may be low, high, or insurmountable. Of course, if a State chooses not to exercise the power given it by the Twenty-first Amendment and to continue to treat intoxicating liquors like other articles, the operation of the Commerce Clause continues. Since the Commerce Clause *301is subordinate to the exercise of state power under the Twenty-first Amendment, the Sherman Law, deriving its authority from the Commerce Clause, can have no greater potency than the Commerce Clause itself. It must equally yield to state power drawn from the Twenty-first Amendment. And so, the validity of a charge under the Sherman Law relating to intoxicating liquors depends upon the utilization by a State of its constitutional power under the Twenty-first Amendment. If a State for its own sufficient reasons deems it a desirable policy to standardize the price of liquor within its borders either by a direct price-fixing statute or by permissive sanction of such price-fixing in order to discourage the temptations of cheap liquor due to cutthroat competition, the Twenty-first Amendment gives it that power and the Commerce Clause does not gainsay it. Such state policy can not offend the Sherman Law even though distillers or middlemen agree with local dealers to respect this policy. If an agreement among local dealers not to buy liquor through channels of interstate commerce does not offend the Sherman Law though a like agreement as to other commodities would, an agreement among liquor dealers to abide by state policy for a uniform price — which is far less restrictive of interstate commerce than a comprehensive boycott — can hardly be a violation of the Sherman Law.
Thus the question in this case, as I see it, is whether in fact the policy of Colorado sanctions such an arrangement as the indictment charges. Such a policy may be expressed either formally by legislation or by implied permission. Unless state policy is voiced either by legislation or by state court decisions, it is precarious business for an outsider to be confident about the legal policy of a State. So far as our attention has been called to materials relevant for ascertaining the policy of Colorado toward such a price arrangement as is here charged, it would be temerarious to suggest that Colorado does sanction it. Indeed, the leg*302islation of Colorado looks in the opposite direction. And we have no guidance from state decisions to suggest that the apparent condemnation of such an arrangement under the Colorado Fair Trade Act, § 2, Colo. Stat. Ann., ch. 165, § 20 (2), does not condemn the price arrangements before us. Although the Attorney General of Colorado has filed a brief as amicus curiae on the side of the respondents, his argument is not based on the contention that the policy of Colorado sanctions that which it is claimed the Sherman Law forbids. In the view I take of the matter, if a State authorized the transactions here complained of, the Sherman Law could not override such exercise of state power. For, in any event, if state policy did so authorize it, conformity with the state policy could not be deemed an “unreasonable’' restraint of interstate commerce. But I do not find that Colorado has done so.
The decision of the court below is not without support in what has been said in the past in holding that, apart from the Twenty-first Amendment, this was a restraint local in its nature and therefore outside the scope of the Sherman Law. But price-fixing is such an immediate restraint upon trade that I do not think that the reach of the consequences of such an obvious restraint should be determined by drawing too nice lines as a matter of pleading. The case is before us, in effect, on demurrer to the indictment and judged abstractly, as a matter of pleading, I cannot say that the indictment was demurrable.
Me. Justice Roberts concurs in this opinion.