Opinion of the Court
this Court has long consulted original and historical understandings of the Constitution’s structure and the principles of “sovereignty and comity” it embraces. BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore, 517 U. S. 559, 572 (1996). This Court has invoked as well a number of the Constitution’s express provisions—including “the Due Process Clause and the Full Faith and Credit Clause.” Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Shutts, 472 U. S. 797, 818 (1985). The antidiscrimination principle found in our dormant Commerce Clause cases may well represent one more effort to mediate competing claims of sovereign authority under our horizontal separation of powers. But none of this means, as petitioners suppose, that any question about the ability of a State to project its power extraterritorially must yield to an “almost per se” rule under the dormant Commerce Clause. This Court has never before claimed so much “ground for judicial supremacy under the banner of the dormant Commerce Clause.” United Haulers Assn., Inc. v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management Authority, 550 U. S. 330, 347 (2007). We see no reason to change course now.[1]
- ↑ Beyond Baldwin, Brown-Forman, and Healy, petitioners point to Edgar v. MITE Corp., 457 U. S. 624 (1982), as authority for the “almost per se” rule they propose. Invoking the dormant Commerce Clause, a plurality in that case declined to enforce an Illinois securities law that “directly regulate[d] transactions which [took] place … wholly outside the State” and involved individuals “having no connection with Illinois.” Id., at 641–643 (emphasis added). Some have questioned whether the state law at issue in Edgar posed a dormant Commerce Clause question as much as one testing the territorial limits of state authority under the Constitution’s horizontal separation of powers. See, e.g., D. Regan, Siamese Essays: (I) CTS Corp. v. Dynamics Corp. of America and Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine; (II) Extraterritorial State Legislation, 85 Mich. L. Rev. 1865, 1875–1880, 1897–1902 (1987); cf. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U. S. 529, 535 (2013) (“[A]ll States enjoy equal sovereignty”). But either way, the Edgar plurality opinion does not support the rule petitioners propose. That decision spoke to a law that directly regulated out-
