Pike v. Bruce Church, Inc

• Decision Date: 02 March 1970
• Docket Number: No. 301,301
• Parties: Loren J. PIKE, etc., Appellant, v. BRUCE CHURCH, INC
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

397 U.S. 137

90 S.Ct. 844

25 L.Ed.2d 174

Loren J. PIKE, etc., Appellant,

v BRUCE CHURCH, INC.

No. 301.

Argued Jan. 13, 1970.

Decided March 2, 1970.

Rex E. Lee, Phoenix, Ariz., for appellant.

Jacob Abramson, Salinas, Cal., for appellee.

Mr. Justice STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.

The appellee is a company engaged in extensive commercial farming operations in Arizona and California. The appellant is the official charged with enforcing the Arizona Fruit and Vegetable Standardization Act.¹ A provision of the Act requires that, with certain exceptions, all cantaloupes grown in Arizona and offered for sale must 'be packed in regular compact arrangement in closed standard containers approved by the supervisor * * *.'² Invoking his authority under that provision, the appellant issued an order prohibiting the appellee company from transporting uncrated cantaloupes from its Parker, Arizona, ranch to nearby Blythe, California, for packing and processing. The company then brought this action in a federal court to enjoin the order as unconstitutional. A three-judge court was convened. 28 U.S.C. §§ 2281, 2284. After first granting temporary relief, the court issued a permanent injunction upon the ground that the challenged order constituted an unlawful burden upon interstate commerce. This appeal followed. 28 U.S.C. § 1253. 396 U.S. 812, 90 S.Ct. 91, 24 L.Ed.2d 65.

The facts are not in dispute, having been stipulated by the parties. The appellee company has for many years been engaged in the business of growing, harvesting, processing, and packing fruits and vegetables at numerous locations in Arizona and California for interstate shipment to markets throughout the Nation. One of the company's newest operations is at Parker, Arizona, where, pursuant to a 1964 lease with the Secretary of the Interior, the Colorado River Indian Agency, and the Colorado River Indian Tribes, it undertook to develop approximately 6,400 acres of uncultivated, arid land for agricultural use. The company has spent more than $3,000,000 in clearing, leveling, irrigating, and otherwise developing this land. The company began growing cantaloupes on part of the land in 1966, and has harvested a large cantaloupe crop there in each subsequent year. The cantaloupes are considered to be of higher quality that those grown in other areas of the State. Because they are highly perishable, cantaloupes must upon maturity be immediately harvested, processed, packed, and shipped in order to prevent spoliage. The processing and packing operations can be performed only in packing sheds. Because the company had no such facilities at Parker, it transported its 1966 Parker cantaloupe harvest in bulk loads to Blythe, California, 31 miles away, where it operated centralized and efficient packing shed facilities. There the melons were sorted, inspected, packed, and shipped. In 1967 the company again sent its Parker cantaloupe crop to Blythe for sorting, packing, and shipping. In 1968, however, the appellant entered the order here in issue, prohibiting the company from shipping its cantaloupes out of the State unless they were packed in containers in a manner and of a kind approved by the appellant. Because cantaloupes in the quantity involved can be so packed only in packing sheds, and because no such facilities were available to the company at Parker or anywhere else nearby in Arizona, the company faced imminent loss of its anticipated 1968 cantaloupe crop in the gross amount of $700,000. It was to prevent this unrecoverable loss that the District Court granted preliminary relief.³

After discovery proceedings, an agreed statement of facts was filed with the court. It contained a stipulation that the practical effect of the appellant's order would be to compel the company to build packing facilities in or near Parker, Arizona, that would take many months to construct and would cost approximately $200,000. After briefing and argument, the court issued a permanent injunction, finding that 'the order complained of constitutes an unlawful burden upon interstate commerce.'⁴

The appellant's threshold contention here is that even though the challenged order expressly forbids the interstate bulk shipment of the company's cantaloupes, it imposes no burden upon interstate commerce. If the Arizona Act is complied with, he argues, all that will be regulated will be the intrastate packing of goods destined for interstate commerce. Articles being made ready for interstate movement are not necessarily yet in interstate commerce, which, he says, begins only when the articles are delivered to the interstate shipper. In making this argument, the appellant relies on this Court's decisions in Federal Compress & Warehouse Co. v. McLean, 291 U.S. 17, 54 S.Ct. 267, 78 L.Ed. 622, and Chassaniol v. City of Greenwood, 291 U.S. 584, 54 S.Ct. 541, 78 L.Ed. 1004. Both of those cases involved taxes imposed by Mississippi on a cotton warehouse and compress business located within that State. The taxes were non-discriminatory and were levied both on the warehoused cotton itself and on certain processes necessary to ready it for subsequent resale. The taxes were challenged as unlawful burdens on interstate commerce, since most of the taxed cotton was ultimately to be shipped to out-of-state buyers. The Court upheld the constitutionality of the Mississippi taxes. It is not entirely clear from the Court's opinions whether their rationale was that the taxes were imposed before interstate commerce had begun, or that the burden upon commerce was at the most indirect and remote.

But in any event, the decisions do not support the argument that the order in the present case does not offect interstate commerce. In the first place, those cases involved cotton that had come to rest in Mississippi and '(b)efore shipping orders (were) given, it (had) no ascertainable destination without the state.' 291 U.S., at 21, 54 S.Ct. at 269. Here, by contrast, the perishable cantaloupes were destined to be shipped to an ascertainable location in California immediately upon harvest. Even more to the point, the taxes in Federal Compress and Chassaniol were imposed on goods and operations within the State, whereas the application of the statute at issue here would require that an operation now carried on outside the State must be performed instead within the State so that it can be regulated there. If the appellant's theory were correct, then statutes expressly requiring that certain kinds of processing be done in the home State before shipment to a sister State would be immune from constitutional challenge. Yet such stat- utes have been consistently invalidated by this Court under the Commerce Clause. Foster-Fountain Packing Co. v. Haydel, 278 U.S. 1, 49 S.Ct. 1, 73 L.Ed. 147; Johnson v. Haydel, 278 U.S. 16, 49 S.Ct. 6, 73 L.Ed. 155; Toomer v. Witsell, 334 U.S. 385, 68 S.Ct. 1156, 92 L.Ed. 1460. See also Lemke v. Farmers Grain Co., 258 U.S. 50, 42 S.Ct. 244, 66 L.Ed. 458; Shafer v. Farmers Grain Co., 268 U.S. 189, 45 S.Ct. 481, 69 L.Ed. 909. Thus it is clear that the appellant's order does affect and burden interstate commerce, and the question then becomes whether it does so unconstitutionally.

Although the criteria for determining the validity of state statutes affecting interstate commerce have been variously stated, the general rule that emerges can be phrased as follows: Where the statute regulates even-handedly to effectuate a legitimate local public interest, and its effects on interstate commerce are only incidental, it will be upheld unless the burden imposed on such commerce is clearly excessive in relation to the putative local benefits. Huron Portland Cement Co. v. City of Detroit, 362 U.S. 440, 443, 80 S.Ct. 813, 816, 4 L.Ed.2d 852. If a legitimate local purpose is found, then the question becomes one of degree. And the extent of the burden that will be tolerated will of course depend on the nature of the local interest involved, and on whether it could be promoted as well with a lesser impact on interstate activities. Occasionally the Court has candidly undertaken a balancing approach in resolving these issues, Southern Pacific Co. v. Arizona, 325 U.S. 761, 65 S.Ct. 1515, 89 L.Ed. 1915, but more frequently it has spoken in terms of 'direct' and 'indirect' effects and burdens. See, e.g., Shafer v. Farmers Grain Co., supra.

At the core of the Arizona Fruit and Vegetable Standardization Act are the requirements that fruits and vegetables shipped from Arizona meet certain standards of wholesomeness and quality, and that they be packed in standard containers in such a way that the outer layer or exposed portion of the pack does not 'materially misrepresent' the quality of the lot as a whole.⁵ The impetus for the Act was the fear that some growers were shipping inferior or deceptively packaged produce, with the result that the reputation of Arizona growers generally was being tarnished and their financial return concomitantly reduced. It was to prevent this that the Act was passed in 1929. The State has stipulated...