Philadelphia v. New Jersey

Appellant
City of Philadelphia
Appellee
State of New Jersey
Appellant's Claim
That a New Jersey law prohibiting disposal of liquid or solid waste within its borders, which "originated or was collected outside the state," violated the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
Chief Lawyer for Appellant
Herbert F. Moore
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Steven Skillman
Justices for the Court
Harry A. Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, John Paul Stevens, Potter Stewart (writing for the Court), Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
Warren E. Burger, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., William H. Rehnquist
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
27 January 1978
Decision
The New Jersey legislature discriminated against other states under the Commerce Clause by banning disposal of waste from Philadelphia in the Garden State.
Significance
Under Philadelphia v. New Jersey environmental protectionism was foundto be just as unconstitutionally "illegitimate" as any other barrier "isolating the state from the national economy." The decision effectively barred state legislatures from giving inhabitants of its own state "preferred rights,"even to protect the natural ecology or as a safeguard against fears of possible "contagion."
The per curium decision in Philadelphia v. New Jersey meant "the court was ruling that the great compact drawn up in Philadelphia in 1787 implied a common undertaking that no state would try to solve its problems primarily at the expense of the people of other states." So argued famed Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in his book, The Court and the Constitution. New Jersey could not protect its environment "by discriminating against thewaste of other states," Cox concluded.
Mounting public concern about environmental degradation in the late 1960s andearly 1970s led to the passage of many state and federal laws. Perhaps the most notable state law was a 1974 New Jersey law prohibiting the dumping of out-of-state solid and liquid wastes in the Garden State other than garbage fedto pigs. New York and Philadelphia, which had been finding it "expedient ornecessary," to use New Jersey as a dump for decades, protested. The New Jersey Supreme Court, however, agreed with the state legislature that any economicburden that New York and Philadelphia suffered as a consequence was "slight." The state court also found the need to protect New Jersey's health, resources, and environment against a "cascade of rubbish."
The city of Philadelphia sued New Jersey, citing the 1851 Supreme Court decision Cooley v. The Board of Wardens. That decision said prescribed state regulations, in the absence of federal statutes, "require uniformity" while"admitting of diversity." Under that formula, the Supreme Court had overturned many state laws designed to protect jobs, industries, and financial resources. Quarantines of diseased animals were notable exceptions. Such quarantines had been upheld, Justice Stewart wrote in Philadelphia v. New Jerseybecause:

[D]iseased livestock required destruction as soon as possible because their very movement risked contagion. The New Jersey law is not such a quarantine law. There has been no claim here that the very movementof waste into or through New Jersey endangers health, or that waste must be disposed of as soon and as close to its point of generation as possible.

The justice continued:

The harms caused by the waste are said to arise after its disposal in landfill sites, and, at that point, as NewJersey concedes, there is no basis to distinguish out-of-state waste from domestic waste. If one is inherently harmful, so is the other. Yet New Jersey has banned the former while leaving its landfill sites open to the other.

New Jersey was engaged in "an obvious effort," Justice Stewart concluded, "tosaddle those outside the state with the entire burden of slowing the flow ofrefuse into New York's remaining landfill sites. That legislative effort isclearly impermissible under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution."
Justice Rehnquist dissented on behalf of himself and Chief Justice Burger:

New Jersey should be free . . . to prohibit the importation of solidwaste because of the health and safety problems that such wastes poses to its citizens . . . I do not see why a state may not ban the importation of items whose importation risks contagion, but cannot ban the importation of itemswhich, although they may be transported . . . without undue hazard, will thensimply pile up in an ever increasing danger to the public's health and safety. The Commerce Clause was not drawn with a view to having the validity of state laws turn on such pointless distinctions.

Justice Rehnquist then drew a distinction of his own, differing from JusticeStewart's, between the refuse of New Jersey and that of other states. New Jersey's own dumping of wastes in landfills, Rehnquist argued:

. . .does not mean that solid waste is not innately harmful. New Jersey out of sheer necessity must treat and dispose of its solid waste in some fashion, justas it must treat New Jersey cattle suffering from hoof-and-mouth disease. Itdoes not follow that New Jersey must, under the Commerce Clause, accept solid waste or diseased cattle from outside its borders and thereby exacerbate its problems.

Solid waste, however, is not the equivalent of contaminated cattle, nor can anyone, including future chief justices, logically prove a negative. Without some positive proof to the contrary, the fact that solid waste may not be "innately harmful" is not proof that it is, in fact, "innately harmful." The conclusion in Philadelphia v. New Jersey is still a standing law.
Related Cases

• Cooley v. The Board of Wardens, 53 U.S. 299 (1891).
  
• Dutchess Sanitation, Inc. v. Town of Plattekill, 433 F.Supp. 580 (1977).

Landfills
Landfills are the most commonly used methods of disposing of hazardous waste.However, landfills are considered to be an inefficient and dangerous means of waste disposal. There are over six thousand hazardous waste landfills in the United States. Some of these landfills are owned by companies designed to deal exclusively with waste disposal, while others are run by companies who generate large amounts of hazardous waste by-product in the production of goods.
When hazardous waste businesses fail, the government is left to clean up theabandoned sites. The Comprehensive Environment Response Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (or Superfund) was established, in large part, to deal withsuch eventualities. Due to federal regulations established in the late 1980sand early 1990s, which tightened restrictions on where landfills could be established, there has been a shortage of landfill space in the U.S.
Sources
American City and County, Vol. 109, no. 8, July, 1992, p. 38.