Toomer v. Witsell/Concurrence Black

by Hugo Black

United States Supreme Court

334 U.S. 385

Toomer  v.  Witsell

 Argued: Jan. 13, 14, 1948. --- Decided: June 7, 1948

Mr. Justice BLACK concurs in the judgment of the Court and all of the opinion except part Fifth.

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, whom Mr. Justice JACKSON, joins, concurring.

Barring the portion entitled Fourth I join the Court's opinion. While I agree that South Carolina has exceeded her power to control fisheries within her waters, I rest the invalidity of her attempt to do so on the Commerce Clause. The Court reaches this result by what I deem to be a misapplication of the Privileges-and-Immunities Clause of Art.I V, § 2, of the Constitution.

To regard any limitation upon the Privileges-and-Immunities Clause as 'some unexpressed exception' and not give any clue to the basis on which such an 'exception' may be implied is to leave the matter too much at large. It deals with the Constitution as though its various clauses were discrete and not a coherent scheme for government. Specifically, the Privileges-and-Immunities Clause, like the Contract Clause, must be put 'in its proper perspective in our constitutional framework.' East New York Savings Bank v. Hahn, 326 U.S. 230, 232, 66 S.Ct. 69, 70, 90 L.Ed. 34, 160 A.L.R. 1279.

Like other provisions of the Constitution, the Clause whereby 'The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States' must be read in conjunction with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. This clause presupposes the continued retention by the States of powers that historically belonged to the States, and were not explicitly given to the central government or withdrawn from the States. I think it is fair to summarize the decisions which have applied Art. IV, § 2, by saying that they bar a State from penalizing the citizens of other States by subjecting them to heavier taxation merely because they are such citizens or by discriminating against citizens of other States in the pursuit of ordinary livelihoods in competition with local citizens. It is not conceivable that the framers of the Constitution meant to obliterate all special relations between a State and its citizens. This Clause does not touch the right of a State to conserve or utilize its resources on behalf of its own citizens, provided it uses these resources within the State and does not attempt a control of the resources as part of a regulation of commerce between the States. A State may care for its own in utilizing the bounties of nature within her borders because it has technical ownership of such bounties or, when ownership is in no one, because the State may for the common good exercise all the authority that technical ownership ordinarily confers.

When the Constitution was adopted, such, no doubt, was the common understanding regarding the power of States over its fisheries, and it is this common understanding that was reflected in McCready v. Virginia, 94 U.S. 391, 24 L.Ed. 248. The McCready case is not an isolated decision to be looked at askance. It is the symbol of one of the weightiest doctrines in our law. It expressed the momentum of legal history that preceded it, and around it in turn has clustered a voluminous body of rulings. Not only has a host of State cases applied the McCready doctrine as to the power of States to control their game and fisheries for the benefit of their own citizens, but in our own day this Court formulated the amplitude of the McCready doctrine by referring to 'the regulation or the distribution of the public domain, or of the common property or resources of the people of the state, the enjoyment of which may be limited to its citizens as against both aliens and the citizens of other states.' Truax v. Raich, 239 U.S. 33, 39, 40, 36 S.Ct. 7, 10, 60 L.Ed. 131, L.R.A.1916D, 545, Ann.Cas.1917B, 283.

But a State cannot project its powers over its own resources by seeking to control the channels of commerce among the States. It is one thing to say that a food supply that may be reduced to control by a State for feeding its own people should be only locally consumed. The State has that power and the Privileges-and-Immunities Clause is no restriction upon its exercise. It is a wholly different thing for the State to provide that only its citizens shall be engaged in commerce among the States, even though based on a locally available food supply. That is not the exercise of the basic right of a State to feed and maintain and give enjoyment to its own people. When a State regulates the sending of products across State lines we have commerce among the States as to which State intev ention is subordinate to the Commerce Clause. That is the nub of the decision in Foster-Fountain Packing Co. v. Haydel, 278 U.S. 1, 49 S.Ct. 1, 73 L.Ed. 147. South Carolina has attempted such regulation of commerce in shrimp among the States. In doing so she has exceeded the restrictions of the Commerce Clause.

Notes