United States v. International Business Machines Corp., 517 U.S. 843, 9 (1996)

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Cite as: 517 U. S. 843 (1996)

Opinion of the Court

Commerce Clause that we have since rejected. In Fairbank, 181 U. S., at 298-300, for example, we analogized to Robbins v. Shelby County Taxing Dist., 120 U. S. 489, 497 (1887), in which we held that "[i]nterstate commerce cannot be taxed at all [by the States], even though the same amount of tax should be laid on domestic commerce, or that which is carried on solely within the state." Referring to the categorical ban on taxation of interstate commerce declared in Robbins, we likened the scope of the Commerce Clause's ban on state taxation of interstate commerce to the Export Clause's ban on federal taxation of exports. Fairbank, supra, at 300; see also Hvoslef, 237 U. S., at 15 ("The court [in Fairbank] found an analogy in the construction which had been given to the commerce clause in protecting interstate commerce from state legislation imposing direct burdens"). After Thames & Mersey, the Commerce Clause construction espoused in Robbins fell out of favor, see Western Live Stock v. Bureau of Revenue, 303 U. S. 250, 254 (1938) ("It was not the purpose of the commerce clause to relieve those engaged in interstate commerce from their just share of state tax burden even though it increases the cost of doing the business"), and we expressly disavowed that view in Complete Auto Transit, Inc. v. Brady, 430 U. S. 274, 288-289 (1977).

Our rejection in Complete Auto of much of our early dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence did not, however, signal a similar rejection of our Export Clause cases. Our decades-long struggle over the meaning of the nontextual negative command of the dormant Commerce Clause does not lead to the conclusion that our interpretation of the textual command of the Export Clause is equally fluid. At one time, the Court may have thought that the dormant Commerce Clause required a strict ban on state taxation of interstate commerce, but the text did not require that view.2

2 The Commerce Clause is an express grant of power to Congress to "regulate Commerce . . . among the several States." U. S. Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 3. It does not expressly prohibit the States from doing anything,

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