Cite as: 511 U. S. 383 (1994)
O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment
to require meat sold within the State to be examined by state inspector); Foster-Fountain Packing Co. v. Haydel, 278 U. S. 1 (1928) (unconstitutional for State to require that shrimp heads and hulls must be removed before shrimp can be removed from the State); South-Central Timber Development, Inc. v. Wunnicke, 467 U. S. 82 (1984) (unconstitutional for State to require all timber to be processed within the State prior to export).
Local Law 9, however, lacks an important feature common to the regulations at issue in these cases—namely, discrimination on the basis of geographic origin. In each of the cited cases, the challenged enactment gave a competitive advantage to local business as a group vis-à-vis their out-of-state or nonlocal competitors as a group. In effect, the regulating jurisdiction—be it a State (Pike), a county (Fort Gratiot Sanitary Landfill, Inc. v. Michigan Dept. of Natural Resources, 504 U. S. 353 (1992)), or a city (Dean Milk)—drew a line around itself and treated those inside the line more favorably than those outside the line. Thus, in Pike, the Court held that an Arizona law requiring that Arizona cantaloupes be packaged in Arizona before being shipped out of state facially discriminated against interstate commerce: The benefits of the discriminatory scheme benefited the Arizona packaging industry, at the expense of its competition in California. Similarly, in Dean Milk, on which the majority heavily relies, the city of Madison drew a line around its perimeter and required that all milk sold in the city be pasteurized only by dairies located inside the line. This type of geographic distinction, which confers an economic advantage on local interests in general, is common to all the local processing cases cited by the majority. And the Court has, I believe, correctly concluded that these arrangements are protectionist either in purpose or practical effect, and thus amount to virtually per se discrimination.
In my view, the majority fails to come to terms with a significant distinction between the laws in the local process-
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