United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598, 14 (2000)

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Cite as: 529 U. S. 598 (2000)

Opinion of the Court

elsewhere, substantially affect any sort of interstate commerce"); see also id., at 573-574 (Kennedy, J., concurring) (stating that Lopez did not alter our "practical conception of commercial regulation" and that Congress may "regulate in the commercial sphere on the assumption that we have a single market and a unified purpose to build a stable national economy"), 577 ("Were the Federal Government to take over the regulation of entire areas of traditional state concern, areas having nothing to do with the regulation of commercial activities, the boundaries between the spheres of federal and state authority would blur"), 580 ("[U]nlike the earlier cases to come before the Court here neither the actors nor their conduct has a commercial character, and neither the purposes nor the design of the statute has an evident commercial nexus. The statute makes the simple possession of a gun within 1,000 feet of the grounds of the school a criminal offense. In a sense any conduct in this interdependent world of ours has an ultimate commercial origin or consequence, but we have not yet said the commerce power may reach so far" (citation omitted)). Lopez's review of Commerce Clause case law demonstrates that in those cases where we have sustained federal regulation of intrastate activity based upon the activity's substantial effects on interstate commerce, the activity in question has been some sort of economic endeavor. See id., at 559-560.4

The second consideration that we found important in analyzing § 922(q) was that the statute contained "no express jurisdictional element which might limit its reach to a discrete set of firearm possessions that additionally have

4 Justice Souter's dissent does not reconcile its analysis with our holding in Lopez because it apparently would cast that decision aside. See post, at 637-643. However, the dissent cannot persuasively contradict Lopez's conclusion that, in every case where we have sustained federal regulation under the aggregation principle in Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S. 111 (1942), the regulated activity was of an apparent commercial character. See, e. g., Lopez, 514 U. S., at 559-560, 580.

611

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