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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> As far I understand, Congress does not have the authority to override the states in this way.

Remote interstate hiring is obviously interstate commerce, and Congress has clear preemptive authority over that.

I suppose it could be, since the commerce clause is also routinely cited as justification for "war on drugs" type of efforts. However, I don't think it is as clear cut as you make it. A contract executed in one state is not automatically interstate simply because the parties to the contract reside or operate in different states. It matters where the contract is executed. A contract can state things like "will be judged in an XYZ court according to XYZ law".

Choice of laws clauses don't really impact whether commerce is interstate. If goods or services are crossing state lines, it is interstate commerce (and not in the fuzzy might-indirectly-impact sense of Wickard v. Filburn, though even that is settled law), regardless of whether there are choice of laws clauses in a contract governing the trade that specify a particular state laws.

Just because bits are travelling across the wire and the digital artifacts happen to stored in Kalamazoo does not mean services or goods have crossed state lines. Otherwise, using a telephone to talk to your employee or customer in another state would involve crossing state lines. That simply isn't the case in the normal course of business.

The fact that this conversation is this complex gives me a feeling that remote work is going to be the backdrop for a lot of court cases in the next decade.

> Just because bits are travelling across the wire and the digital artifacts happen to stored in Kalamazoo does not mean services or goods have crossed state lines.

Yes, it does.

> The fact that this conversation is this complex

I like that you not only inject false complexity into the conversation, but also pretend that that act is some kind of external fact that proves something about the underlying issue.

Bits travel one way, but dollars travel in the other. That's the distinction.

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