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1 1 (June 26, 2023)

handle is hein.crs/govemaw0001 and id is 1 raw text is: $ ** Congressional ______ Research Service The Eighteenth Amendment and National Prohibition, Part 4: Early Prohibition Laws June 26, 2023 This Legal Sidebar post is the fourth in a seven-part series that discusses the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Prior to its repeal, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes within the United States. Section 2 of the Amendment granted Congress and the state legislatures concurrent power to enforce nationwide Prohibition by enacting appropriate legislation. The Eighteenth Amendment was partly a response to the Supreme Court's pre-Prohibition Era Commerce Clause jurisprudence, which limited the federal and state governments' power over the liquor traffic. As such, the Eighteenth Amendment's history provides insight into the judicial evolution of the Commerce Clause, which operates as both a positive grant of legislative power to Congress and a limit on state authority to regulate commerce. Additional information on this topic will be published in the Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Early Federal and State Prohibition Laws Before the Civil War, several states enacted laws that restricted or banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages statewide. However, by the war's end, most of these states had repealed or weakened their prohibition laws. In the late 1800s, a resurgent temperance movement prompted the enactment of new statewide bans or restrictions on the liquor traffic. Producers and sellers of alcoholic beverages challenged some of these state prohibition laws in federal court, contending that they violated various provisions of the Constitution, including the Commerce Clause. In evaluating constitutional challenges to late 19th century state prohibition laws, the Supreme Court confirmed the states' power to prohibit the intrastate manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. However, the Court held that the Commerce Clause prevented the states from banning the importation or initial sale of out-of-state beverages that remained in their original packages. The Court decided that, absent contrary federal law, such state bans impermissibly burdened interstate commerce. Responding to concerns that the Supreme Court's decisions would prevent dry states from enforcing their prohibition laws fully, Congress enacted various statutes that specifically subjected imported alcoholic beverages to state regulation. For instance, the Webb-Kenyon Act of 1913 effectively authorized the states to restrict the direct shipment of imported alcoholic beverages to consumers for Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10988 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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