The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday said it will decide whether online retailers must pay state sales taxes even if they have no physical presence in the state, a move they have long resisted but one the court has expressed interest in revisiting.

The justices will hear arguments in a case brought by South Dakota against online giants Wayfair, Overstock.com and NewEgg Inc. A victory for the state could open a potential multibillion-dollar source of revenue for the states.

The South Dakota petition was among 12 cases that the justices agreed to review and will likely fill most of the remaining argument slots in the current term. Among the other cases, the justices said they will consider challenges by Texas to lower court rulings that its redistricting plans were racial gerrymanders. And they have agreed to decide whether administrative law judges at the Securities and Exchange Commission were hired in violation of the Constitution's appointments clause.

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South Dakota and Alabama have been leading legal fights with online retailers in order to overturn a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision that bars the states from collecting sales taxes from those retailers if they don't have a physical location in the state. South Dakota's petition urges the high court to overturn Quill v. North Dakota.

Quill is “a severely criticized, constitutional holding that itself warned when decided that it might later be reconsidered,” Goldstein & Russell's Eric Citron, counsel to South Dakota, said in court papers. Citron noted that the decision has been criticized by justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. “And after 25 years of technological progress and economic changes, it has proven entirely out of date,” Citron argued.

Technological advances have made it easy for retailers to collect different states' sales taxes, contends South Dakota. At the same time, Quill gives those retailers an unfair advantage of their brick-and-mortar competitors, states the petition.

“Retail is a dynamic industry that's rapidly transforming,” Matthew Shay, the National Retail Federation president and CEO, said in a statement Friday. “Unfortunately, antiquated sales tax collection rules have resulted in an uneven playing field that's making it harder for Main Street retailers to compete in today's digital economy. This is a basic question about fairness, which all of our members deserve whether they're selling in stores or online.”

South Dakota, with an eye to moving a case to the Supreme Court, enacted a law applying an “economic presence” test. The law requires a seller who does not have a physical presence in the state to remit sales tax if the seller, in the prior or current year, meets either of two, alternative criteria: the seller's gross revenue from sales delivered into South Dakota exceeds $100,000 or the seller made sales for delivery into South Dakota in 200 or more separate transactions.

Wayfair and the two other online retailers responded that South Dakota was seeking an “extraordinary” action by the justices.

“It urges this court to intervene in a complex policy matter, which Congress is actively addressing,” their lawyer, George Isaacson of Brann & Isaacson in Lewiston, Maine, said in court papers. “It demands that the court overrule long-standing precedent on which thousands of companies continue to rely. It proposes that the court expose those businesses to potentially bankrupting back-tax liability. All of this, the state requests in the absence of any record evidence.”

South Dakota's petition attracted 17 supporting briefs from such groups as 35 states, National Retail Federation, American Booksellers Association, American Farm Bureau Federation and the Multistate Tax Commission. A number of members of Congress, the American Catalog Mailers Association and Americans for Tax Reform filed briefs in support of the online retailers.

This report was updated with comment about the Supreme Court's order.