West Lynn Creamery, Inc. v. Healy, 512 U.S. 186, 22 (1994)

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Cite as: 512 U. S. 186 (1994)

Scalia, J., concurring in judgment

to produce by the certainty that he will have free access to every market in the Nation, that no home embargoes will withhold his exports, and no foreign state will by customs duties or regulations exclude them. Likewise, every consumer may look to the free competition from every producing area in the Nation to protect him from exploitation by any. Such was the vision of the Founders; such has been the doctrine of this Court which has given it reality." H. P. Hood & Sons, Inc. v. Du Mond, 336 U. S. 525, 539 (1949).

The judgment of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts is reversed.

It is so ordered.

Justice Scalia, with whom Justice Thomas joins, concurring in the judgment.

In my view the challenged Massachusetts pricing order is invalid under our negative-Commerce-Clause jurisprudence, for the reasons explained in Part II below. I do not agree with the reasons assigned by the Court, which seem to me, as explained in Part I, a broad expansion of current law. Accordingly, I concur only in the judgment of the Court.

I

The purpose of the negative Commerce Clause, we have often said, is to create a national market. It does not follow from that, however, and we have never held, that every state law which obstructs a national market violates the Commerce Clause. Yet that is what the Court says today. It seems to have canvassed the entire corpus of negative-Commerce-Clause opinions, culled out every free-market snippet of reasoning, and melded them into the sweeping principle that the Constitution is violated by any state law or regulation that "artificially encourag[es] in-state production even when the same goods could be produced at lower cost in other States." Ante, at 193. See also ante, at 194 (the

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