Law Commons^™

Latest Development Of The Interstate Commerce Power, Edward B. Whitney

Michigan Law Review

The litigation under the anti-lottery act of 1895, has for the first time raised the important constitutional question whether congress, under its general power to regulate interstate commerce, can select any particular article and exclude it from interstate commerce altogether-whether the power to regulate involves the power to prohibit. For nearly a century after the foundation of the government no attempt was made by congress to restrict interstate commerce by excluding any article therefrom. Quarantine legislation, however, opened the way, and the anti-lottery act sharply raised the question of power. Lottery tickets in the earliest days of the republic were …