Supreme Court case: Total Wine vs Tennessee

vav1 · Jan 19, 2019

Oral argument transcript is up:

Brewbound Summary

I've said it a million times now: the laws haven't caught up to the business of beer yet. This is an interesting one about whether or not a state can essentially discriminate against an out-of-state retailer with residency requirements and so on. This also has further implications into other industries (Amazon, etc) even though it's primarily a 21st Amendment issue.

Anyway, i'm curious to see how this goes. Binny's was shut out of Indiana a year or so ago due to Indiana enacting similar legislation to effectively block them.

FTowne1 · Jan 19, 2019

I'm a fan of anything that cockblocks Amazon from growing any further. However, I'm not so sure about this.

vav1 · Jan 19, 2019

Plenty of states operate without a residency requirement and do just fine, so to me it looks like protectionism by Tennessee. Sotomayor's comments on page 15-17 of the transcript i think are quite succinct.

FTowne1 · Jan 19, 2019

vav said:
Plenty of states operate without a residency requirement and do just fine, so to me it looks like protectionism by Tennessee. Sotomayor's comments on page 15-17 of the transcript i think are quite succinct.

I'm on the path to totally being on beer for the rest of the day, so I'll have to revisit this at a time where I'm able to focus a little better.

sherm10161 · Jan 19, 2019

As the Brewbound article speculates, it’s going to be a narrow ruling that outlaws the residency requirements but doesn’t address the “physical prescence” question. I see neither the conservative bloc of the court nor the liberal bloc believing that it’s ok for a state to discriminate against out of state competition. But a majority of the court is not ready to completely do away with the three-tier system as it stands today.