Brown v. City of Newark

I would have thought that an ordinance that defined the peddler’s activity as the Supreme Court has done would pass muster. The plaintiffs, however, have used the label “perpetual motion ordinance” to disable and to raise doubt about an otherwise familiar description of the business of peddling.

The idea of the peddler is that of “an itinerant or traveling trader, who carries goods about in order to sell them, and who actually sells them to purchasers, in contradistinction to a trader who has goods for sale and sells them in a fixed place of business.” Emert v. Missouri, 156 U.S. 296, 308, 15…