Supreme Court Allows Direct Shipment of Wine

jrrl writes "For a while now, ordering wine (of the alcoholic variety, not the almost 0.9 variety) online has been a somewhat dicey proposition in some states. But today, the Supreme Court overturned state laws that disallowed direct shipment of wine from out of state. Their reasoning is that the states' 'authority to regulate the sale of alcohol within their borders' under the 21st Amendment does not supersede 'the Constitution's ban on state discrimination against interstate commerce.' States could still disallow all direct shipments, but at least they have to be evenhanded now."

Comments

The Geek/Wine Interface Is Now Complete

[ScentCone]

Actually, if you live in Maryland (or many of the other impacted states), this is a long overdue, worthy development. I'm just waiting for the state to cut its own nose off, and ban the shipment of wine including that of the (marginal) local wineries.

Never the less, I expect that those of us that build e-commerce web sites will have a few hundred brand new - if slightly tipsy - customers. With the patchwork shipping problem gone, many of the smaller operations will now consider it worth getting into the game. Thank you, Supreme Court, for doing the right thing on this. Cheers!

Justices Vote Was Surprising

[Black-Man]

Kennedy, Scalia, Souter, Ginsberg and Breyer... what a majority.

John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas against!?! When was the last time they were on the same side of the fence?

Maybe this court isn't as political as some seem to believe.

Re:Justices Vote Was Surprising

[drmerope]

This is still a very usual split, but overall, the political nature of the court is exaggerated. When I last saw stats (several years ago), any pairwise comparison of the justices found them in agreement at least 60% of the time.

That said, this particular 5-4 split has not happened in the past ten years

However, within 5-4 decisions, Stevens and Thomas agree about 16 percent of the time.

Scalia was clearly the swing-vote on this case

"Although Scalia is no fan of the dormant commerce clause, he has written that: ... I will, on stare decisis grounds, enforce a self executing "negative" Commerce Clause in two situations: (1) against a state law that facially discriminates against interstate commerce, and (2) against a state law that is indistinguishable from a type of law previously held unconstitutional by this Court.

Since the state laws in question here demonstrably fell into the former category, and we can infer that Scalia was not persuaded by Thomas' account of the 21st amendment, stare decisis required him to vote to strike down these laws." (http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/05/suprem e_court_s.html)

It's the basic dilemma of democracy

[ShatteredDream]

Thomas' dissent was about respecting the laws that congress had already established, the written letter of the constitution and the "protecting minors" angle that the states supposedly had. Beside the obvious fact that protecting minors was never a factor in this regulatory area, Thomas does indirectly invoke a good question. Where does too much freedom become a problem?

I happen to believe that morality means nothing when not imposed from within. Law and order can only accomplish so much and history has shown that the states that care about peace and that leave the matters of personal morality like sex and drug use to the church to deal with are the states that have the most peace. That's why some of us believe that the state's goal should be to maximize freedom to the highest extent without undermining law and order, even if many of the people don't want it.

For libertarians, this makes sense. Why not be able to have both unfettered school prayer AND legal drug use by adults? Isn't society better off when the individual is free and the government has a few defined tasks that it specializes on rather than becoming some monstrosity that has 50 bazillion departments that regulate everything from littering to education to the hair cut a toy poodle can have on sunday? Sometimes what the people want isn't moral or legal as it infringes on the rights of others without cause.

There was no good reason to keep people from being able to buy wine from other states directly. Part of the goal of the establishment of the federal government was to turn the states into a free trade zone. That's why the federal government has the exclusive authority to regulate interestate commerce. The "will of the people" had to bow to the law, and sometimes doing that actually makes the people freer than they may want to admit.

Part of the reason we have a constitution is that our founders did not believe that the will of the people often should be followed... and for good reason. It was the will of most whites for much of our history to keep blacks down. It was the will of most Germans to elect Hitler. Go down the line and you'll see that good men and women backed by good laws, not a democratic process, have carried the day for freedom and justice.

Re:Lets Drink! Opps. Sorry, was that your SISTER?

[ScentCone]

I don't get why it even matters. I mean, why should wine be any different than computer equipment, condoms, flowers or pepperidge farms gift baskets? Why should any of them be restricted (or for that matter, why shouldn't ALL of them be restricted).

It doesn't matter, and that's the point that the Supreme Court just hammered home. The real essence of this is that a state can do a lot of things to regulate what (and how) things can be sold in their state, but they can't do so in a way that discriminates against people in other states (people, in this case, being winemakers selling across the border). So, you can let everyone sell wine, or no one. But the patchwork of crazy regulations was definately restricting commerce in an asymmetrical (and unconstitutional) way.

The Baptists will be/get pissed.

[MonkeyBoyo]

Baptists (non drinkers) have been a major force behind attempted legislation to force all alcohol to be sold from local retail outlets. They claim it is so underage kids can't order their own wine and drift into a life of sin. But who really thinks that a parent would not notice credit charge bills or large packages delivered to home.

The real reason is to keep other adult Baptists from secrectly drinking. Right now, most "wet Baptists" have to drive 100 miles to buy their hooch at liquor store where it is unlikely someone will recognize them. UPS delivery will make it much easier to be secrectly wet.

"If you go fishing with a Baptist, make sure there is at least 2 of them" (e.g. if there is only one then he will drink all of your beer).

Re:Commerce Clause

[Deadstick]

It has nothing to do with making decisions for you, and everything to do with collecting money. California has loads of small wineries that market their goods online. If you're a distributor in, say, Ohio, you could distribute their product, but for the small number of cases they ship, it wouldn't be worth the effort -- it's much more efficient to distribute wine that comes in trainloads. But every case the indies ship to Ohio is a case you don't sell -- so it's in your interest to stop those cases at the Indiana line. And it's in the state's interest too, because liquor taxes are big and it's difficult to collect them on online sales.

There's an analogous situation here in Colorado: you can't buy a bottle of liquor on Sunday. The state isn't banning it to save your soul; you're welcome to drink your way to perdition in a bar. The reason? Sunday closing is much more harmful to total by-the-drink sales than it is to total package sales, and business overhead is substantially higher for a 7-day store than for a 6-day store. So bars stay open on Sunday, liquor stores close, and they're both happy. Every attempt to repeal the Sunday-closing law is shot down by the liquor business.

Same deal on cars, by the way...you can't buy a car on Sunday, and John Elway Toyota wouldn't have it any other way.

rj