Two neighbors can live across the street from each other, want to buy the same bottle from the same out-of-state retailer, and get two different legal answers. That’s the reality an Ohio attorney laid out this week in a Supreme Court amicus brief supporting cert in Yost v. Miller — and it’s the clearest illustration yet of how badly federal courts disagree on direct-shipping law. Your Constitutional right to buy wine online should not depend on your zip code.
The case centers on retailer shipping, a step removed from the producer fight playing out in Shady Knoll’s Ninth Circuit challenge to Washington’s distillery laws. But the underlying problem is the same: courts can’t agree on how to apply the Supreme Court’s Granholm v. Heald and Tennessee Wine precedents, and the resulting circuit split means the Constitution effectively means something different depending on where a wine buyer lives.
The brief’s sharpest example is Union City — a town split down the middle by the Ohio-Indiana state line. Under the Seventh Circuit’s ruling in Chicago Wine, a resident on the Indiana side can’t receive a shipment from an out-of-state retailer. Under the Sixth Circuit’s ruling, the neighbor on the Ohio side can. Same retailer, same bottle, same transaction — different outcome, based entirely on which side of the street someone happens to live.
The brief argues several appellate courts have drifted from the Supreme Court’s own framework, substituting a looser “essential feature” test for the more demanding analysis Granholm and Tennessee Wine actually require. That drift, it contends, has left retailers navigating a patchwork of conflicting constitutional obligations and consumers locked out of specialty wines their local markets don’t carry — not because of any public-safety rationale, but because of which federal circuit happens to have jurisdiction.
Whether the Court grants review remains an open question. But between Yost v. Miller and the Shady Knoll case working through the Ninth Circuit, direct-to-consumer shipping law is having its most active stretch in years — and producers, retailers, and consumers alike are still operating without a single national standard to build around.