Colorado Marijuana Law Survives US Supreme Court Challenge

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday announced that it will not hear a case filed by the states of Nebraska and Oklahoma against Colorado seeking to overturn Colorado’s 2012 law allowing commercial growing and distribution of marijuana in the state. The court voted six to two against hearing the suit, which was filed in December of 2014.

Because the case involves a dispute between two states it was filed directly with the Supreme Court. The ruling does not preclude Nebraska and Oklahoma from filing a similar lawsuit in federal district court.

In May of 2015, the Supreme Court asked the U.S. Solicitor General to weigh in on the case. In December the Solicitor General filed a brief that urged the Supreme Court to reject the challenge to Colorado law:

The motion for leave to file a bill of complaint should be denied because this is not an appropriate case for the exercise of this Court’s original jurisdiction. Entertaining the type of dispute at issue here — essentially that one State’s laws make it more likely that third parties will violate federal and state law in another State — would represent a substantial and unwarranted expansion of this Court’s original jurisdiction.

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Monday’s decision was released without comment from the majority, but Justice Clarence Thomas was joined in his dissenting opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. Thomas wrote:

The complaint, on its face, presents a ‘controvers[y] between two or more States’ that this Court alone has authority to adjudicate. The plaintiff States have alleged significant harms to their sovereign interests caused by another State. Whatever the merit of the plaintiff States’ claims, we should let this complaint proceed further rather than denying leave without so much as a word of explanation.

Colorado’s law has survived at least three other recent challenges, and with the federal government and the Obama administration continuing to maintain their distance from the controversy, the law is looking more solid every day.

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