C & a Carbone, Inc., et al. v. Town of Clarkstown, New York (511 U.S. 383)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided May 16, 1994 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 511 U.S. 383 · 114 S. Ct. 1677
- Decided
- May 16, 1994
- Term
- October Term 1993
- Vote
- 6–3
- Majority author
- Justice Kennedy
- Issue area
- Economic Activity
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
- Constitutional ruling
- Local ordinance held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court. As solid waste output continues apace and landfill capacity becomes more costly and scarce, state and local governments are expending significant resources to develop trash control systems that are efficient, lawful, and protective of the environment. The difficulty of their task is evident from the number of recent cases that we have heard involving waste transfer and treatment. See Philadelphia v. New Jersey, 437 U. S. 617 (1978); Chemical Waste Management, Inc. v. Hunt, 504 U. S. 334 (1992); Fort Gratiot Sanitary Landfill, Inc. v. Michigan Dept, of Natural Resources, 504 U. S. 353 (1992); Oregon Waste Systems, Inc. v. Department of Environmental Quality of Ore., ante, p. 93. The case decided today, while perhaps a small new chapter in that course of decisions, rests nevertheless upon well-settled principles of our Commerce Clause jurisprudence. We consider a so-called flow control ordinance, which requires all solid waste to be processed at a designated transfer station before leaving the municipality. The avowed purpose of the ordinance is to retain the processing fees charged at the transfer station to amortize the cost of the facility. Because it attains this goal by depriving competitors, including out-of-state firms, of access to a local market, we hold that the flow control ordinance violates the Commerce Clause.…
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