Steiner v. Utah: Designing a Constitutional Remedy

Authors

Michael S. Knoll, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law SchoolFollow
Ruth Mason, University of Virginia - Main CampusFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-9-2020

Abstract

In an earlier article, we argued that the Utah Supreme Court failed to follow and correctly apply clear U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Steiner v. Utah when the Utah high court held that an internally inconsistent and discriminatory state tax regime did not violate the dormant commerce clause. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court recently declined certiorari in Steiner, but the issue is unlikely to go away. Not every state high court will defy the U.S. Supreme Court by refusing to apply the dormant commerce clause, and so the Court will sooner or later likely find itself facing conflicting interpretations of the dormant foreign commerce clause. Accordingly, in this article we address an issue that we did not cover in our earlier article: how Utah could revise its tax system to satisfy the Constitution.

Keywords

State income taxation law & policy, constitutional law, commerce clause, dormant commerce clause, foreign commerce clause, tax discrimination, Steiner v. Utah, Wynne v. Maryland, Supreme Court of the United States, SCOTUS

Publication Title

Tax Notes State

Publication Citation

Tax Notes State, March 9, 2020

Repository Citation

Knoll, Michael S. and Mason, Ruth, "Steiner v. Utah: Designing a Constitutional Remedy" (2020). All Faculty Scholarship. 2165.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2165