Hugo Black

“ It is one thing to say that a food supply that may be reduced to control by a State for feeding its own people should be only locally consumed. The State has that power and the Privileges-and-Immunities Clause is no restriction upon its exercise. It is a wholly different thing for the State to provide that only its citizens shall be engaged in commerce among the States, even though based on a locally available food supply. That is not the exercise of the basic right of a State to feed and maintain and give enjoyment to its own people. ”

“ The McCready case is not an isolated decision to be looked at askance. It is the symbol of one of the weightiest doctrines in our law. It expressed the momentum of legal history that preceded it, and around it in turn has clustered a voluminous body of rulings. ”

“ This Clause does not touch the right of a State to conserve or utilize its resources on behalf of its own citizens, provided it uses these resources within the State and does not attempt a control of the resources as part of a regulation of commerce between the States. A State may care for its own in utilizing the bounties of nature within her borders because it has technical ownership of such bounties or, when ownership is in no one, because the State may for the common good exercise all the authority that technical ownership ordinarily confers. ”