Source: https://openjurist.org/287/us/358
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 10:58:39+00:00

Document:
SUNBURST OIL & REFINING CO.
Argued and Submitted Nov. 11, 1932.
Sunburst Oil & Refining Company, the respondent, brought suit against petitioner, Great Northern Railway Company, to recover payments claimed to be overcharges for freight. The charges were in conformity with a tariff schedule approved by the Railroad Commission of Montana for intrastate traffic. After payment had been made, the same commission which had approved the schedule held, upon a complaint by the shiper, that the rates so approved were excessive and unreasonable. In this action to recover the excess so paid, the shipper recovered a judgment which was affirmed upon appeal. 7 P.(2d) 927. The question, broadly stated, is whether the annulment by retroaction of rates valid when exacted is an unlawful taking of property within the Fourteenth Amendment. A writ of certiorari brings the case here. 287 U.S. 580, 53 S.Ct. 7, 77 L.Ed. —-.
We think the Federal Constitution has no voice upon the subject. A state in defining the limits of adherence to precedent may make a choice for itself between the principle of forward operation and that of relation backward. It may say that decisions of its highest court, though later overruled, are law none the less for intermediate transactions. Indeed, there are cases intimating, too broadly (cf. Tidal Oil Co. v. Flanagan, supra), that it must give them that effect; but never has doubt been expressed that it may so treat them if it pleases, whenever injustice or hardship will thereby be averted. Gelpcke v. Dubuque, 1 Wall. 175, 17 L.Ed. 520; Douglass v. County of Pike, 101 U.S. 677, 687, 25 L.Ed. 968; Loeb v. Columbia Township Trustees, 179 U.S. 472, 492, 21 S.Ct. 174, 45 L.Ed. 280; Harris v. Jex, 55 N.Y. 421, 14 Am.Rep. 285; Menges v. Dentler, 33 Pa. 495, 499, 75 Am.Dec. 616; Com. v. Fidelity & Columbia Trust Co., 185 Ky. 300, 215 S.W. 42; Mason v. Cotton Co., 148 N.C. 492, 510, 62 S.E. 625, 18 L.R.A.(N.S.) 1221, 128 Am.St.Rep. 635; Hoven v. McCarthy Bros. Co., 163 Minn. 339, 204 N.W. 29; Farrior v. New England Mortgage Security Co., 92 Ala. 176, 9 So. 532, 12 L.R.A. 856; Falconer v. Simmons, 51 W.Va. 172, 41 S.E. 193.1 On the other hand, it may hold to the ancient dogma that the law declared by its courts had a Platonic or ideal existence before the act of declaration, in which event the discredited declaration will be viewed as if it had never been, and the reconsidered declaration as law from the beginning. Tidal Oil Co. v. Flanagan, supra; Fleming v. Fleming, supra; Central Land Co. v. Laidley, 159 U.S. 103, 112, 16 S.Ct. 80, 40 L.Ed. 91; see, however, Montana Bank v. Yellowstone County, supra.2 The alternative is the same whether the subject of the new decision is common law (Tidal Oil Co. v. Flanagan, supra) or statute. Gelpcke v. Dubuque, supra; Fleming v. Fleming, supra. The choice for any state may be determined by the juristic philosophy of the judges of her courts, their conceptions of law, its origin and nature. We review, not the wisdom of their philosophies, but the legality of their acts. The state of Montana has told us by the voice of her highest court that, with these alternative methods open to her, her preference is for the first. In making this choice, she is declaring common law for those within her borders. The common law as administered by her judges ascribes to the decisions of her highest court a power to bind and loose that is unextinguished, for intermediate transactions, by a decision overruling them. As applied to such transactions, we may say of the earlier decision that it has not been overruled at all. It has been translated into a judgment of affirmance and recognized as law anew.
Cf. Gray, Nature and Sources of the Law, §§ 535—550; Holmes, J., in Kuhn v. Fairmont Coal Co., 215 U.S. 349, 371, 30 S.Ct. 140, 54 L.Ed. 228.

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