Comptroller of the Treasury v. Wynne: Bridging the Gap Between Strands of Jurisprudence on State Income Taxation

Daniel Bosworth

In Comptroller of the Treasury v. Wynne the United States Supreme Court upheld a Maryland Court of Appeals decision in holding that the State of Maryland’s “county tax” on income earned out of state, without a credit for taxes paid to the host state, violated the Commerce Clause. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, is the culmination of a long-standing strand of Commerce Clause jurisprudence arguing that the Court should use the Commerce Clause actively in order to protect interstate commerce from discrimination by double taxation. The principal dissent, on the other hand, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, follows an equally valid strand of jurisprudence in arguing for the states to retain the sovereignty to tax all of their residents’ income and to defer to the political process whenever possible. The competition between these strands of jurisprudence has resulted in staggeringly inconsistent decisions on state taxation issues. Rather than bridging the gap between these distinct pillars of Supreme Court jurisprudence to create a test that generates replicable results, the Wynne Court simply chose to reprise its long-at-odds strands of jurisprudence