Opinion of the Court
commerce outside their borders. Gibbons, 9 Wheat., at 203; see also Cooley, 12 How., at 317–321. Petitioners’ “almost per se” rule against laws that have the “practical effect” of “controlling” extraterritorial commerce would cast a shadow over laws long understood to represent valid exercises of the States’ constitutionally reserved powers. It would provide neither courts nor litigants with meaningful guidance in how to resolve disputes over them. Instead, it would invite endless litigation and inconsistent results. Can anyone really suppose Baldwin, Brown-Forman, and Healy meant to do so much?
In rejecting petitioners’ “almost per se” theory we do not mean to trivialize the role territory and sovereign boundaries play in our federal system. Certainly, the Constitution takes great care to provide rules for fixing and changing state borders. Art. IV, §3, cl. 1. Doubtless, too, courts must sometimes referee disputes about where one State’s authority ends and another’s begins—both inside and outside the commercial context. In carrying out that task, this Court has recognized the usual “legislative power of a State to act upon persons and property within the limits of its own territory,” Hoyt v. Sprague, 103 U. S. 613, 630 (1881), a feature of our constitutional order that allows “different communities” to live “with different local standards,” Sable Communications of Cal., Inc. v. FCC, 492 U. S. 115, 126 (1989). But, by way of example, no one should think that one State may adopt a law exempting securities held by the residents of a second State from taxation in that second State. Bonaparte v. Tax Court, 104 U. S. 592, 592–594 (1882). Nor, we have held, should anyone think one State may prosecute the citizen of another State for acts committed “outside [the first State’s] jurisdiction” that are not “intended to produce [or that do not] produc[e] detrimental effects within it.” Strassheim v. Daily, 221 U. S. 280, 285 (1911).
To resolve disputes about the reach of one State’s power,
