576
Opinion of the Court
discriminates against interstate commerce. The Maine law expressly distinguishes between entities that serve a principally interstate clientele and those that primarily serve an intrastate market, singling out camps that serve mostly instaters for beneficial tax treatment, and penalizing those camps that do a principally interstate business. As a practical matter, the statute encourages affected entities to limit their out-of-state clientele, and penalizes the principally non-resident customers of businesses catering to a primarily interstate market.
If such a policy were implemented by a statutory prohibition against providing camp services to nonresidents, the statute would almost certainly be invalid. We have "consistently . . . held that the Commerce Clause . . . precludes a state from mandating that its residents be given a preferred right of access, over out-of-state consumers, to natural resources located within its borders or to the products derived therefrom." New England Power Co. v. New Hampshire, 455 U. S. 331, 338 (1982). Our authorities on this point date to the early part of the century.9 Petitioner's "product" is
9 In West v. Kansas Natural Gas Co., 221 U. S. 229 (1911), we held invalid under the Commerce Clause an Oklahoma statute that had the effect of preventing out-of-state consumers from purchasing Oklahoma natural gas. We ruled similarly in Pennsylvania v. West Virginia, 262 U. S. 553 (1923), that a West Virginia statute limiting out-of-state users' access to West Virginia gas to that not "required to meet the local needs for all purposes," id., at 594, violated the Commerce Clause. We found those cases directly analogous in New England Power, ruling invalid a state law that reserved for state citizens domestically generated hydroelectric power. In Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U. S. 617 (1978), we struck down a New Jersey statute prohibiting certain categories of out-of-state waste from flowing into the State's landfills, noting that "a State may not accord its own inhabitants a preferred right of access over consumers in other States to natural resources located within its borders." Id., at 627. And, in Hughes v. Oklahoma, 441 U. S., at 338, we ruled that a statute prohibiting the export of minnows for sale out of State violated the Commerce Clause. We held similarly in Sporhase v. Nebraska ex rel. Douglas, 458 U. S. 941, 958 (1982), that a provision preventing the export of ground water to States not allowing reciprocal export rights was an impermissible barrier to com-
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