TRENTON Big rigs passing through New Jersey must be allowed to roll on local roads, according to a federal appeals court ruling that invalidated the state’s effort to restrict double-trailer trucks and many tractor-trailers to major highways. The 7-year-old ban violates the U.S. Constitution’s “commerce clause” since New Jersey is discriminating against interstate commerce, according to the unanimous ruling of a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “We find the state officials’ contention that all highway safety regulations are entitled to deferential treatment to be without merit,” the court said in a 17-page opinion released Tuesday. The decision upheld a March 2004 ruling by a federal judge in Newark who had stayed his decision while the state appealed. No such stay was included by the circuit court, so the ban is over at least for the moment. The state had been preparing “emergency rules” that would continue the ban in case of such a ruling and they will be implemented “as soon as possible,” state Department of Transportation spokeswoman Erin Phalon said Wednesday. She could not say when that might occur. The department is considering whether to appeal the ruling. An appeal was urged by the New Jersey State League of Municipalities. The ban prohibited double trailers and 102-inch-wide trucks from secondary and rural roads. Large trucks were restricted to major highways the interstates, the New Jersey Turnpike and the Atlantic City Expressway unless they had an origin or a destination in New Jersey. The ban was challenged by the American Trucking Association, of Alexandria, Va., and U.S. Xpress Enterprises Inc., a trucking company based in Chattanooga, Tenn., which claimed it discriminated against out-of-state truckers. Truckers charged the ban cost them millions in extra tolls and fuel. The 3rd Circuit said in declaring New Jersey’s ban unconstitutional, it relied on a ruling last year in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws in Michigan and New York that had prohibited out-of-state wineries from shipping bottles to residents of their states. In the trucking case, “the regulations explicitly provide for different treatment of in-state and out-of-state economic interests by limiting the access that the latter interest has to New Jersey roads,” said the appeals court in an opinion written by U.S. Circuit Judge Julio M. Fuentes. He was joined by Circuit Judges Leonard I. Garth and Marjorie O. Rendell.