Court Opinion

ID: 9467102
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:38:37.587161+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:09.757314
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
The admirable opinions by my colleagues in this close case put each of the opposing positions better than could I. Reading either alone, my impulse is to concur. Since this is so, I write briefly to set out the somewhat primitive course of reasoning that moves me to join in holding the preference here accorded Georgia producers invalid.
I part company with the dissenting view early, with a statement in its third sentence: “the State [has not] prohibited or limited the flow of trade across its borders.” Granted that this were so, I could not disagree with much of what follows in Judge Randall’s dissent.1 But I think the flow is interfered with here, and in an impermissible way, though the question is a very close one.
It is certainly true that the State of Georgia has not acted directly to forbid entry of Alabama produce. It has done no more than disadvantage foreign producers somewhat in their competition with domestic *1086ones for the Georgia produce market by relegating them to the end of the line in sale-booth assignments-and this, moreover, in a facility that, but for Georgia taxpayers, would not exist. At first blush, this may seem a slight burden, but implicit in the findings of the court below is that it is not slight but significant.2
Since this is so and the burden is not de minimis, I am unable to see how the case differs in principle from one in which foreign producers were denied use of the facility entirely.
This being so, and the case being therefore properly seen as one in which some market is being interfered with severely-to the advantagé of domestic producers and the detriment of foreign ones-the inquiry comes down to answering the question: a market in what ?
If the market is properly to be viewed as one in sale booths for produce, then Georgia occupies a proprietary capacity as the producer of the booths. And if it does so, then under the Reeves and Alexandria Scrap decisions of the Supreme Court, Georgia may as a proprietor deal in its booths pretty much as it likes.3 But if the relevant market be seen as one in vegetables, then Georgia is not their producer or seller and hence does not occupy a proprietary position as to them. Instead, it is one who has focussed and localized an existing market by constructing the physical selling facility in which it is carried on. As such, its activities seem to me more analagous to those of a regulator than to those of a proprietor.
I conclude that this case is one about produce, not about sale booths. The case seems to me, therefore, undistinguishable in principle from one in which the state denies to out-of-state producers the use of principal state highways, relegating them to back roads, or confines the use of a state-built coliseum or theatre to that by entertainers residing in Georgia. The state need not act to aid existing markets by the construction of physical facilities, but where it does, it seems to me that the concept of a common market created by the Commerce Clause requires that foreign and domestic marketeers be treated indifferently. I therefore join in the majority opinion.

. I do not imply that merely because it does inhibit that flow it is necessarily invalid, only that the circumstance that it does requires further inquiry.

. The judge found as a fact that the drive through shed to which plaintiff Smith was relegated by the Georgia preference “is a less desirable location from which to sell produce than the elevated sheds” and concluded that Smith would be irreparably damaged unless the injunction issued.

. In Reeves, Inc. v. Stake, — U.S. -, 100 S.Ct. 2271, 65 L.Ed.2d 244 (1980), the state produced the basic commodity, cement. In Hughes v. Alexandria Scrap Corp., 426 U.S. 794, 96 S.Ct. 2488, 49 L.Ed.2d 220 (1976), the state had enhanced-and therefore partly created a local market in automobile hulks by paying a bounty on them.