After Tennessee Wine a trans-border delivery rule that discriminates against interstate commerce is forbidden.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit heard oral arguments on September 17, 2026, in Freehan v. Berg, the challenge to an Illinois law that lets in-state wine retailers ship to Illinois residents while denying that privilege to out-of-state retailers.
The plaintiffs are Washington-based wine retailer Full Pull Wines and Illinois wine collectors Timothy Freehan and Joseph Grody, who say many rare wines they seek are not sold by Illinois retailers. On September 25, 2025, Judge Jeremy C. Daniel of the Northern District of Illinois granted summary judgment for the defendants, Illinois Liquor Control Commission members and the Wine and Spirits Distributors of Illinois. The case is now before a Seventh Circuit panel of Judges Frank Easterbrook, Ilana Rovner and Rebecca Taibleson.
The central question is whether Illinois's retailer shipping law discriminates against interstate commerce, and if so whether the state can justify it under the Twenty-First Amendment, following the Supreme Court's framework in Tennessee Wine & Spirits Retailers Ass'n v. Thomas.
A panel of opposites
The three judges come to the case with form on the underlying question. In Lebamoff v. Rauner, Judge Rovner joined a unanimous panel that found the Illinois retailer shipping law discriminatory, held that the state had not justified it on the record then before the court, and sent the case back for evidence.
Judge Easterbrook's more recent word on the subject is Chicago Wine Co. v. Braun, 148 F.4th 530 (7th Cir. 2025), where a panel he sat on upheld Indiana's version of the rule in a per curiam decision. The majority judges reached the same result by different routes and wrote separately: Easterbrook would have found no discrimination in the first place; Judge Scudder was prepared to assume discrimination and still uphold the law as justified.
For the plaintiffs, Alex Tanford argued that Lebamoff governs: it decided the status of this same Illinois law, and the law is unchanged. Easterbrook pushed back, treating Chicago Wine as having settled how Lebamoff now reads. Judge Taibleson questioned the most, and her vote is the one both sides are counting. Her hardest question for Tanford was practical: how would Illinois inspect retailers located in other states? His answer was that the state already licenses and permits out-of-state wineries, and could do the same for retailers.
The Easterbrook trap
The state's position, put by Assistant Attorney General Sam Horan, is that a rule any out-of-state retailer can satisfy by opening an Illinois store does not discriminate at all. The awkward precedent for that argument is Easterbrook's own: in Chicago Wine he took the line that a discriminatory delivery rule falls, without an evidentiary second chance for the state. "After Tennessee Wine a trans-border delivery rule that discriminates against interstate commerce is forbidden," he wrote.
Taibleson sounded doubtful that the law is neutral, but her sustained interest in inspection and enforcement shows the state's justification evidence is getting a hearing from her. Possible outcomes range from striking the law down, to upholding it on discrimination grounds, to a split: Taibleson rejecting Easterbrook's no-discrimination theory but joining him in the result on the evidence, as Judge Scudder did in Chicago Wine.
The case is one of several retailer-shipping challenges working through the federal circuits, and the Seventh Circuit's treatment of its own precedents will be watched closely by distributors, retailers and direct-to-consumer businesses across the three-tier system.