Eighteenth Amendment

Section 1:

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2:

The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3:

This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Only a few months after Prohibition took effect, the Supreme Court confirmed the sweeping scope of the Eighteenth Amendment and Volstead Act.1 In the National Prohibition Cases, the Court upheld the Eighteenth Amendment and provisions of the Volstead Act against various legal challenges.2 The Court determined that Section 1 of the Amendment, which barred the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol for beverage purposes, established Prohibition throughout the “entire territorial limits of the United States.” 3 The Amendment’s prohibitions applied to interstate, intrastate, and foreign transactions subject to U.S. jurisdiction.4

In addition to possessing a broad territorial and transactional scope, the Eighteenth Amendment bound both private entities and government actors, including Congress, the state legislatures, federal and state courts, and public officers.5 Section 1’s prohibitions were self-executing and invalidated any legislative act—by Congress, the states, or territorial assemblies—that authorized the use of alcohol contrary to Prohibition.6 Nonetheless, the Eighteenth Amendment did not establish any mechanism for its enforcement but instead relied on Congress and the states to implement its commands.7

Footnotes

1

Between the time of the Amendment’s ratification on January 16, 1919 and its effective date of January 17, 1920, the Supreme Court interpreted the Eighteenth Amendment in at least one case. See Hamilton v. Ky. Distilleries & Warehouse Co., 251 U.S. 146, 163–64 (1919) (rejecting the argument that the Eighteenth Amendment’s one-year delay of Prohibition had implicitly invalidated the War-Time Prohibition Act, which prohibited the sale of intoxicating alcoholic beverages until the President proclaimed that World War I had ended).

2

253 U.S. 350, 386–87 (1920).

3

Id.; Cunard S.S. Co. v. Mellon, 262 U.S. 100, 122 (1923) (defining “transportation” for purposes of the Eighteenth Amendment as “any real carrying about or from one place to another” and “territory” as “the regional areas—of land and adjacent waters—over which the United States claims and exercises dominion and control as a sovereign power,” including, “the ports, harbors, bays and other enclosed arms of the sea along its coast and a marginal belt of the sea extending from the coast line outward a marine league, or three geographic miles.” ). Both domestic and foreign merchant ships were subject to penalties for violating the Eighteenth Amendment and Volstead Act, even if they carried the illegal alcoholic beverages in sea stores, so long as they were in U.S. territorial waters, ports, or harbors outside of certain places in the Panama Canal Zone. Id. at 127–30. The United States and Great Britain later concluded a bilateral treaty relaxing some of these requirements with respect to British vessels. See The Convention for the Prevention of Smuggling of Intoxicating Liquors, Jan. 23, 1924, Gr. Brit.-U.S., 43 Stat. 1761–63 (1924).

4

United States v. Lanza, 260 U.S. 377, 381 (1922).

5

Nat’l Prohibition Cases, 253 U.S. at 386–87. See also Lanza, 260 U.S. at 381.

6

Nat’l Prohibition Cases, 253 U.S. at 386–87.

7

See U.S. Const. amend. XVIII, §§ 1–2.