United States v. Morrison

Majority reasoning

The Court held that gender-motivated crimes of violence are not economic activity, and that in all prior cases upholding regulation of intrastate activity based on aggregate effects on commerce, the regulated activity had been economic in nature. The statute lacked a jurisdictional element tying it to interstate commerce, and while Congress made extensive findings about the economic effects of gender-motivated violence, those findings relied on a "but-for" causal chain reasoning that the Court had already rejected in United States v. Lopez, because it would let Congress regulate any crime or even family law based on aggregate economic effects. On the Fourteenth Amendment question, the Court held that Section 5 only allows Congress to regulate state action, not purely private conduct, following United States v. Harris and the Civil Rights Cases, and that the civil remedy was not "corrective" of any specific state law or state officials' conduct since it imposed no consequence on any state actor and applied uniformly nationwide rather than being targeted at states with proven bias. The majority responded to the dissent's reliance on Gibbons v. Ogden by stating that Gibbons did not remove from the Court the authority to define the outer boundary of the commerce power, and that the Constitution's structure and Marbury v. Madison establish that courts, not just politics, determine the limits of enumerated powers.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Souter, joined by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, argued that Congress compiled a massive record—including years of hearings, testimony, and reports from gender bias task forces in 21 states—far exceeding the record found sufficient in prior cases like Heart of Atlanta Motel and Katzenbach v. McClung, and that this record rationally supported a finding that gender-motivated violence substantially affects interstate commerce by reducing women's mobility, employment, and economic participation. The dissent contended that the majority's distinction between economic and noneconomic activity has no support in precedent and revives a formalistic approach to the Commerce Clause that was discredited after 1937, comparing it to the failed pre-New Deal doctrines that led to a constitutional crisis. The dissent argued that the proper mediator between state and national power should be politics, not judicial line-drawing, citing the structural protections the Framers built into the Constitution, and noted that 36 states and Puerto Rico filed briefs supporting the law, showing that states themselves wanted federal action rather than protection from it. The dissent also argued that reviving considerations of "traditional state regulation" as a limit on the commerce power had been rejected in cases like Maryland v. Wirtz and Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, and predicted the majority's approach would not endure.