Court Opinion

ID: 9431759
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:33:09.035344+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:30.032205
License: Public Domain

*344Justice Scalia,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
I join the Court’s disposition of this suit and Parts I and IV of its opinion. The Connecticut statute’s invalidity is fully established by its facial discrimination against interstate commerce — through imposition of price restrictions exclusively upon those who sell beer not only in Connecticut but also in the surrounding States — and by Connecticut’s inability to establish that the law’s asserted goal of lower consumer prices cannot be achieved in a nondiscriminatory manner.* See New Energy Co. of Indiana v. Limbach, 486 U. S. 269, 276-277, 279-280 (1988). This is so despite the fact that the law regulates the sale of alcoholic beverages, since its discriminatory character eliminates the immunity afforded by the Twenty-first Amendment. See Bacchus Imports, Ltd. v. Dias, 468 U. S. 263, 275-276 (1984). Since Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc. v. Hostetter, 384 U. S. 35 (1966), upheld a law that operated in like fashion, I agree with the Court that today’s decision requires us to overrule that case. See ante, at 343.
*345I would refrain, however, from applying the more expansive analysis which finds the law unconstitutional because it regulates or controls beer pricing in the surrounding States. See ante, at 335-340. It seems to me this rationale is not only unnecessary but also questionable, resting as it does upon the mere economic reality that the challenged law will require sellers in New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island to take account of the price that they must post and charge in Connecticut when setting their prices in those other States. The difficulty with this is that innumerable valid state laws affect pricing decisions in other States — even so rudimentary a law as a maximum price regulation. Suppose, for example, that the Connecticut Legislature had simply provided that beer could not be retailed in Connecticut above $10 a case. Sellers in those portions of New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island bordering Connecticut would have to take account of that requirement, just as sellers in those States had to take account of the Connecticut posting requirement here, because prices substantially above the maximum would cause their former in-state purchasers to drive to Connecticut and their former Connecticut purchasers to stay home. The out-of-state impact in this particular example would not be as severe as that in the present cases, but I do not think our Commerce Clause jurisprudence should degenerate into disputes over degree of economic effect. In any case, since this principle is both dubious and unnecessary to decide the present cases, I decline to endorse it.

The dissent argues that the facial discrimination inherent in the present statute does not establish its invalidity because no brewer does business solely in Connecticut and because there is no evidence that any shipper sells beer exclusively within that State. Post, at 348. As far as I know we have never required a plaintiff to show that a statute which facially discriminates against out-of-state business in fact benefits a particular in-state business, and we have flatly rejected the kindred contention that the plaintiff could not prevail if the benefit to in-state business was minimal, see New Energy Co. of Indiana v. Limbach, 486 U. S. 269, 276-277 (1988). It would make little sense to require a showing that an instate business in fact exists without also requiring a showing that it is in fact benefited. I see no reason to impose such a burden in order to strike down a statute that is facially discriminatory under the Commerce Clause, any more than we would require the person challenging under the Fourteenth Amendment a state law permitting only Aleuts to vote by mail to show that there are in fact Aleut citizens of the State capable of benefiting from that discrimination.