One of this morning's more consequential Supreme Court decisions was South Dakota v. Wayfair, where the Supreme Court overruled its 51-year-old and 26-year-old decisions in Bellas Hess and Quill to hold that states may require out-of-state retailers to collect and remit sales tax. The decision was 5-4 (and as Jonathan Adler notes, with an unusual lineup), but interestingly all nine justices agreed that the original decision in Bellas Hess was wrongly decided. What they disagreed about was stare decisis -- should the prior decision stand? -- especially given the context of the Court's jurisprudence under the so-called "dormant" Commerce Clause.

Normally the Court adheres more strongly to precedent in cases of statutory interpretation than in constitutional cases because Congress can fix the Court's mistakes of statutory interpretation but can't fix the Court's constitutional mistakes. The dormant Commerce Clause -- under which the courts strike down state laws that improperly burden interstate commerce, unless Congress authorizes those laws -- is somewhere in between. It purports to be an interpretation of the Constitution, but it is still subject to revision by Congress. So what form of stare decisis should apply?

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