The decision late last year by the St. Louis County Board of Commissioners to impose various restrictions on the infant recreational cannabis industry recalls landmark constitutional litigation regarding the scope of federal-government authority and the measurement of distance from prohibited sites.

It came about a year and a half after our state became the 24th in the country, plus the District of Columbia, to legalize recreational marijuana in the decade since Colorado was the first; 38 states and D.C. have removed criminal sanctions on the use of medical marijuana.

The Minnesota initiative has had a bumpy beginning with administrative and personnel difficulties, including the resignation at the beginning of last month of Charlene Briner, interim czar of what is known as the Office of Cannabis Management, the second to leave that post. But that hasn’t impeded local units of government from weighing in with their own regulatory undertakings.

St. Louis County has been one of them, as commissioners, right before Thanksgiving, enacted a measure constricting cannabis in proximity to schools, as well the number of retail locations, and prohibiting places of use. It may become a precedent for other governing units to do likewise, as the newly authorized recreational-marijuana industry develops here.

Under St. Louis County’s ordinance, a retail cannabis business cannot be located within 1,000 feet of a school. Nor can it be within half that distance, 500 feet, from licensed facilities for daycare, residential-treatment facilities, or public parks. Additionally, the measure requires county approval for a single retailer for each 2,500 residents, which amounts to three of them in areas where county zoning laws exist, outside the city of Duluth.

The law, which went into effect at the beginning of this month, supplements state protocols that ban the substance on government property, in public parks, and within areas where tobacco smoking is banned.

The county proscription comes on the 30th anniversary this year of a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate a similar 1,000-foot ban that became a seminal case in the annals of the law. In the criminal lawsuit U.S. v. Lopez, justices struck down a law enacted five years earlier by Congress, the 1990 Gun Free School Zone Act, which prohibited possession of a firearm within 1,000 feet of any public, private, or parochial school.

The high court held in a 5-4 decision that the measure was invalid because it exceeded the authority of Congress under the constitutional provision granting it power over “commerce between the states,” known as the interstate commerce clause. Writing for the narrow majority, Chief Justice William Rehnquist reasoned that the federal law exceeded congressional power because it did not pertain to an activity linked to “commerce,“ within the purview of the interstate commerce provision, but was a “non-economic” criminal regulatory matter subject to local control and legislation, not federal authority.

The Lopez case was the first occasion in a half century when the justices invalidated a congressional action under the interstate commerce clause. It was, in effect, a “states’ rights” ruling concerning state sovereignty, a doctrine that has played a significant role in other high-profile litigation before the high court over the years.

In the Civil Rights Era, the precept was raised by opponents of federal laws and other actions aimed at desegregation and the prevention of racial discrimination. However, it was repeatedly rejected by the high court, notably in unanimously upholding the groundbreaking 1964 Civil Rights Act against constitutional challenge that same year in the case Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States.

The “states’ rights,” or sovereignty doctrine, in the Lopez case forbidding firearms near schools resurfaced five years later in another important case, a decision invalidating the important federal Violence Against Women Act, a measure allowing victims of gender-based violence and wrongdoing to sue their perpetrators in civil lawsuits in federal court. In 2000, the court, in another 5-4 ruling written by the chief justice in U.S. v. Morrison, applied the reasoning of the Lopez case to deem that antiviolence invalid because it did not apply to commercial “economic” actions but was subject to state jurisdiction, primarily family law proceedings.

Meanwhile, following the Lopez case, Congress solved the jurisdictional defect in 1996 by amending the firearms-school prohibition to encompass a gun that has “moved” in interstate commerce or is one that “affects” interstate “economic” activities.

The revised law was upheld as constitutional by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees federal litigation in Minnesota and six nearby states, in a 1999 case, U.S. v. Danks, and in a later California federal court proceeding. Efforts by Republicans in Congress to repeal the amended law were unsuccessful, leaving it in place at the federal level, while many states, including Minnesota, have their own similar restrictive firearms-in-or-near-schools laws, which are not subject to the interstate commerce proscription.

But the civil lawsuit provision of the Violence Against Women law, invalidated in light of the earlier Lopez case, has not been amended or reenacted and remains dormant as to civil lawsuits. However, other provisions of the measure remain in effect, including federal funding of antiviolence programs, which may be a prime candidate for slashing in the Elon Musk/Vivek Ramaswamy $2 trillion cost-cutting initiative through their Department of Government Efficiency.

The cannabis restrictions imposed here in St. Louis County are not subject to the federal jurisdictional issues that doomed the original 1,000-foot, gun-free school law. But in the litigious society of today, other legal challenges may be mounted to it.

Time will tell if cases against the new county regulation are brought and succeed — or if they’re brought and go up in smoke.

Marshall H. Tanick is a Twin Cities constitutional and employment-law attorney and a regular contributor to the News Tribune Opinion page.