Supreme Court Voids Pennsylvania License Law for Steamship Ticket Sellers

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Pennsylvania may not require a state license from agents who sell steamship tickets for travel to and from Europe, holding that the law places a direct burden on foreign commerce. Justice Butler wrote the opinion in Di Santo v. Pennsylvania, which reverses a conviction affirmed by the state’s highest court.

The case began with a sale in December 1921. Di Santo, who represented four steamship companies, sold tickets and transportation orders without the license that Pennsylvania law demanded. He held certificates from the companies and received tickets and sales materials from them, and he collected payment. The facts were not in dispute, and the trial court directed a verdict of guilty. The Superior Court struck down the law, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court restored the conviction.

Butler’s opinion starts from the proposition that selling steamship tickets for passage between the United States and Europe is part of foreign commerce. A state law that by its necessary operation interferes directly with or burdens such commerce, he wrote, is a prohibited regulation no matter what its purpose. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had said the act was meant to prevent fraud on travelers. The Court answered that the power to protect the public from fraud in this field belongs to Congress, and that the license and the other conditions of the Pennsylvania law burden Di Santo’s transactions directly. The majority relied on earlier decisions including Texas Transport Co. v. New Orleans and McCall v. California.

Justice Brandeis dissented, and Justice Holmes joined him. In Brandeis’s view the law was a police measure meant to protect immigrants of small means from fraud, and it was in essence an inspection law of the kind the Court has allowed when Congress has not acted and the state does not obstruct or discriminate against commerce. He said the Court’s earlier McCall decision could be distinguished on its facts.

Justice Stone filed a separate dissent. He criticized the test of whether a state law burdens commerce directly or only indirectly, calling it too mechanical, too uncertain in its application and too remote from actualities to be of value. He argued that the Pennsylvania law concerned local interests and did not impede the free flow of commerce.