As a wine-lover and anti-prohibitionist, all I can say is- yay!
About time! We have no problem, living in God’s Country as we do. But the poor people back East have suffered enough. Let the varietal floodgates open, and pour forth their Goodness on all the benighted people of this Great Land.
ps. Try the Fess Parker 2000 Reserve Syrah. 
Rightly ruled.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to Google “Napa Valley.”
So, is this immediate? Can I start ordering wine via the Internet now? I live in Maryland, by the way.
This is great news!
This Washington Post article (you’ll probably have to register to read it) mentions Maryland wine-shipping laws. IANAL, the Washington Post writer probably isn’t a lawyer, I slept through the only class related to law that I took, this is not legal advice, et cetera.
Dear God, you’re in driving distance of Linganore, Mt Hope, and Breaux! Why would you ever want to ship?
Pardon me, but I’m afraid I must spoil the party a little. As I understand the ruling, based on the story I heard on NPR (cite), the ruling says that states that discriminate against out-of-state wineries must change their laws to make them non-discriminatory. In other words, there’s going to be a (probably long) delay while states change their laws, and they’re not required to allow direct shipment of wine, just to either allow or dissallow it equally. Example: New York currently permits wineries to ship directly to their customers only if they have a physical presence in the State of New York. New York can decide not to allow any wineries to ship directly to customers or to allow all wineries to ship direct, as long as they don’t discriminate between in-state and out-of-state wineries.
Again, that’s just my understanding, and if someone else who’s more knowledgeable would like to correct me, I would love to hear that all states will be required to allow direct wine shipments to customers.
I realize that. But this is a step in the right direction. To quote Bear_Nenno from this thread:
Can any of our legal eagles explain to me just how this squares with the text of the 21st Amendment:
ISTM that the importation of alcohol is exactly what states have been given free rein to regulate here. Doesn’t the amendment alter the meaning of the original, rather than the other way around?
My state would not allow me to receive in-state wines before, so now they must allow me to not receive out of state wines too. Yea.
Wait a minute…
Oh well, I’m still happy for the rest of you.
And so goeth Kansas, too, as I understand it. Yuck.
IANAL etc. but upon reading the opinion I think the Court is saying that the 21st Amendment did not alter the legal and regulatory rules which existed prior to the passage of the 18th Amendment (and which were suspended by the 18th Amendment), but instead returned the state of the law to what existed prior to passage of the 18th. Before that amendment was passed, there were a number of cases which set forth that the Commerce Clause did not allow differential treatment in the regulation of in-state and out-of-state liquor.
The opinion can be found here in PDF format.
Can you point to a particular passage in the opinion that backs that up? A 73-page slip opinion is more than I’m going to wade through, this afternoon.
Your theory strikes me as improbable: it’s hard to read into the original Constitution, or into any of Amendments 1 through 17, a right of the states to regulate importation of alcoholic beverages from the other states - especially as the Commerce Clause presumably prevented the several states from forbidding the importation of anything from other states. So it’s hard to see how Section 2 of the 21st Amendment represents a return to the status quo ante.
Otto’s got it.
Start here:
(1) This Court invalidated many state liquor regulations before the Eighteenth Amendment’s ratification, finding either that the Commerce Clause prevented States from discriminating against imported liquor, Scott v. Donald, 165 U. S. 58, or that States could not pass facially neutral laws that placed an impermissible burden on interstate commerce, Bowman v. Chicago & Northwestern R. Co., 125
…
The States argue that the Webb-Kenyon Act went further, removing any barrier to discriminatory state liquor regulations, but that reading conflicts with Clark Distilling’s description of the Webb-Kenyon Act’s purpose, which was simply to extend the Wilson Act. Nor does the statute’s text compel a different response. At the very least, it expresses no clear congressional intent to depart from the principle disfavoring discrimination against out-of-state goods. Last, and most importantly, the Webb-Kenyon Act did not purport to repeal the Wilson Act, which expressly precludes state discrimination. The Wilson Act reaffirmed, and the Webb-Kenyon Act did not displace, the Court’s Commerce Clause cases striking down state laws that discriminated against out-of-state liquor. States were required to regulate domestic and imported liquor on equal terms. Pp. 12–21.
(2) A brief respite from these legal battles brought on by the Eighteenth Amendment’s ratification ended with the Twenty-first Amendment. The States contend that §2 of the Twenty-first Amendment transfers to States the authority to discriminate against out-of-state goods, but the pre-Amendment history recited here provides strong support for the view that §2 only restored to the States the powers they had under the Wilson and Webb-Kenyon Acts. The Twenty-first Amendment’s aim was to allow States to maintain an effective and uniform system for controlling liquor by regulating its transportation, importation, and use. ** It did not give States the authority to pass nonuniform laws in order to discriminate against out-of-state goods, a privilege they never enjoyed. **
psycat posted the basics. If you don’t want to read the full opinion, just read the syllabus (five pages).
OK then, you’ve got a law. (Or in this case, two of them: the Wilson and Webb-Kenyon Acts.) A Constitutional amendment is passed that makes it moot, and then it’s repealed. What is the status of that law?
To a mathematician’s mind, the law has been in operation all along; it just had nothing to operate on for a time. So it’s still there and valid, and needs no special Constitutional clause to call it back into operation. If that’s how the lawyers view it as well, then the present Supreme Court is saying that Section 2 of the 21st Amendment was meaningless and redundant. I’d have a fundamental problem with that: Constitutional language, IMHO, must have a very, very strong presumption of meaningfulness.
But if the juris doctors are in general agreement that the 18th Amendment killled Wilson and Webb-Kenyon, and Section 1 of the 21st Amendment was insufficient to resurrect them, then ISTM that it can be said that Section 2 performed that purpose, rather than some other.
So, we still need to hear from the legal eagles.
I am by no means a legal eagle, but this case is one that I’ve been following since before it went to the Supreme Court.
I’d like to hear the legal eagles’ viewpoint in layman’s terms myself.
But, here’s my understanding.
The 18th Amendment did not kill the Wilson and Webb-Kenyon Acts, like you said, it made them dormant, moot, etc. And although it doesn’t apply to liquor only, the Commerce Clause, which guarantees free trade among states, is also a factor here.
I wouldn’t say the court is saying Section 2 is ‘meaningless’, but they are saying what happened after the fact was not necessarily what was intended.
From the Syllabus: (continuing right around where the previous post I made left off.)
Cases decided soon after the Twenty-first Amendment’s ratification did not take account of the underlying history and were inconsistent with this view, …, but the Court’s reluctance to consider this history did not reflect a consensus that such evidence was irrelevant or that prior history was unsupportive of the principle that the Amendment did not authorize discrimination against out-of-state liquor. More recent cases confirm that the Twenty-first Amendment does not supersede other provisions of the Constitution and, in particular, does not displace the rule that States may not give a discriminatory preference to their own…
What no one has really touched on here is how/why this discrimination was allowed to continue.
The ‘three tier system’ of distribution (producers sell to wholesalers, who sell to retailers, who sell to consumers) has made some **very ** wealthy distributors, who have been the main source of lobbying against the changes. (I can guarantee you that a bottle of wine that I can go next door and buy at either the winery or the grocery store, will cost considerably more, assuming a distributor even carries it, in another state. No surprise there, but at least 25% of the retail price goes to the distributor alone.) There are literally hundreds of wineries many people have probably never even heard of, not because they aren’t great, but because they just aren’t bought by wholesalers, who won’t make a profit nickel and diming the little guys, but who DO make profits by ‘bundling’ products from larger companies with multiple brands. This sounds dangerously close to a monopoly to me, one that was being protected by the mess of state laws and/or the misunderstanding of them after the 21st Amendment.
OK, but only if the 21st Amendment wasn’t intended to carve out an exception.
The Court refers to legal history (e.g. the aforementioned statutes) but doesn’t seem to discuss legislative history. What did Congress mean, by including language in the Amendment that seemingly duplicated those pre-existing statutes? Surely there must have been a point to doing so.
It seems funny for the Court to suggest that the courts interpreting the 21st Amendment from the vantage point of later that same decade had less of an idea of what was intended by the language than courts ruling in the 1960s and later. If there was a reason for that language that is not written down, surely the courts of the 1930s had a better sense of Congress’ motivation than the courts of today do.
It still seems to me that the Supreme Court is saying that an Amendment doesn’t really mean what it plainly says, and won’t be allowed to modify the Constitution in ways they don’t like.
I agree that wineries ought to be able to sell directly to individuals, wherever they might be. But not by screwing with the legal system. One is much more important than the other.
Under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution (or more specifically what is often called the “Dormant Commerce Clause” because it serves to restrict the states when Congress is silent on a matter), there are certain areas of commerce that can only be regulated by the federal government, and that states can’t touch. One of the most important areas is when a state passes a law that is “protectionist:” typically, protecting in-state businesses from out-of-state competition. For example, New York can’t ban California wines or tax them at a higher rate than local wines. This is “virtually per se unconstituional” except in certain limited instances. The reason for this is that if any state could enact laws to discriminate against other states in favor of its own business interests, the whole purpose of having uniform regulation of commerce at the federal level is frustrated and all the states would suffer from the cumulative effects of protectionism instead of enjoying the benefits of a federal system. Generally, states can only legislate in this manner when Congress or an independent provision of the Constituion gives them permission to do so.
Ah, say the states, but Congress and an independent provsion of the Constitution did give us permission to do so, in the 21st Amendment and the Webb-Kenyon Act, which read together clearly gives us the right to regulate the importation of liquor and the circumstances in which it is sold and used, in any manner we see fit even if discriminatory! Nope, sorry. You can regulate the sale and use of all beverage alcohol in an evenhanded manner, but case law and analysis of legislative history has said again and again that if the state law in question is nothing more than an economic preference for in-state producers, the argument that the 21st Amendment gives the states carte blanche to discriminate won’t fly. As to statutory congressional permission, nothing in the Webb-Kenyan Act can be read as an explicit repeal of the Wilson Act’s affirmation of Congress’ stated intention that states may not regulate in a discriminatory manner, and absent explicit instruction otherwise the Court is required to give effect to both statutes as far as that’s possible.
Okay, sez the state, so what about those aforementioned “certain limited instances?” Case law also says we states can enact discriminatory legislation if it furthers an important state interest when no reasonable nondiscriminatory alternatives exist, and surely we need to both prevent teens from buying booze on the internet and stop tax evasion! Yeah, except that none of the states with such law are reporting that either of those are a problem, and even if they were there are reasonable nondiscriminatory methods of dealing with those problems, like requiring buyers to sign for their purchases. Long story short, law violate Dormant Commerce Clause, law unconstituional, more wine over here, please.
Indiana’s law prohibits direct winery-to-consumer shipment, even from in-state. However, a lawsuit questions the exact intent of the law.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050519/BUSINESS/505190415/1003
7 days Archive
Here is an excerpt:
[quote=Indianapolis Star]
Consumers in Indiana and wine makers in Illinois and Michigan challenged Indiana’s law barring out-of-state wineries from selling directly to Hoosiers.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, could open the way for Internet sales and orders placed directly with wineries throughout the nation.
The litigation begins just two days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that alcohol regulations made by various state legislatures can’t favor local businesses over companies in other states.
Indiana allows wine deliveries to wholesalers but bans out-of-state wineries from shipping directly to consumers in this state. State officials say the law also bans in-state shipments to Indiana residents, although a lawyer handling the lawsuit says the law is ambiguous.
[quote]
It looks like an entertaining case.