Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/373/472
Timestamp: 2014-08-23 13:25:24
Document Index: 522229431

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 192', '§ 221', '§ 31', '§ 17', '§ 226', '§ 31', '§ 16', '§ 28', '§ 26', '§ 27', '§ 26', '§ 27', '§ 221', '§ 221', '§ 221', '§ 221', '§ 226', '§ 441', '§ 453', '§ 2478']

Fenelon BOESCHE, Administrator, etc., Petitioner, v. Stewart L. UDALL, Secretary of the Interior. | LII / Legal Information Institute
Supreme Court aboutsearch liibulletin subscribe previews Fenelon BOESCHE, Administrator, etc., Petitioner, v. Stewart L. UDALL, Secretary of the Interior.
373 U.S. 472 (83 S.Ct. 1373, 10 L.Ed.2d 491)
[HTML] Leon BenEzra, Washington, D.C., for petitioner.
The question presented in this case is whether the Secretary of the Interior has authority to cancel in an administrative proceeding a lease of public lands issued under the provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, 30 U.S.C. 181 et seq., in circumstances where such lease was granted in violation of the Act and regulations promulgated thereunder. Because of a seeming conflict in principle between the decision of the Court of Appeals in this case, 112 U.S.App.D.C. 344, 303 F.2d 204, and that of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Pan American Petroleum Corp. v. Pierson, 284 F.2d 649, and also because of the importance of the question to the proper administration of the Mineral Leasing Act, we brought the case here. 371 U.S. 886, 83 S.Ct. 184, 9 L.Ed.2d 120. For reasons stated hereafter we affirm the judgment below.
Section 17 of the Mineral Leasing Act, 30 U.S.C. 226, authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to grant to the first qualified applicant, without competitive bidding, oil and gas leases of lands in the public domain not within a known geologic structure. These are called 'noncompetitive' leases.
A departmental regulation provides that 'no offer' for a noncompetitive lease 'may be made for less than 640 acres except * * * where the land is surrounded by lands not available for leasing under the act.' 43 CFR § 192.42(d). 'Not available' has always been administratively construed to mean lands not available for leasing to anyone. Hence lands covered only by an outstanding application for a lease are considered available, Natalie Z. Shell, 62 I.D. 417 (1955), and therefore subject to the 640-acre requirement.
applied to the Santa Fe Land Office in New Mexico (whose authority also embraces Oklahoma) for an 80-acre noncompetitive lease of land in Oklahoma. There was already on file an application by one Connell for a noncompetitive lease of an adjoining 40-acre tract, but no lease had issued to Connell at the time of petitioner's application. Immediately following petitioner's application two other persons, Cuccia and Conley, filed for a lease of the entire 120 acres. On December 1, 1956, the 40-acre lease issued to Connell, the validity of which is not questioned here. In November 1957 an 80-acre lease issued to petitioner. Following notification that their 120-acre application had been rejected, Cuccia and Conley pursued a departmental appeal, 43 CFR §§ 221.1221.2. This ultimately resulted in a cancellation of petitioner's lease on the ground that having failed to include in his application the adjoining 40-acre tract (no lease to Connell having then been issued), his 80-acre application was invalid, thus leaving the Cuccia and Conley application in respect of that tract prior in right. Accordingly a lease to them was directed.
rests on § 31 of the Mineral Leasing Act, 30 U.S.C. 188, as amended, which, in pertinent part, reads as follows:
'Any lease issued after August 21, 1935,
under the provisions of * * * (§ 17 of the Act, 30 U.S.C. 226) shall be subject to cancellation by the Secretary of the Interior after thirty days' notice upon the failure of the lessee to comply with any of the provisions of the lease, unless or until the land covered by any such lease is known to contain valuable deposits of oil or gas.'
The statutory provisions referred to by the Court are those vesting the Secretary with general managerial powers over the public lands.
We are not persuaded by petitioner's argumentbased on cases holding that land patents once delivered and accepted could be canceled only in judicial proceedings (e.g., Johnson v. Towsley, 13 Wall. 72, 20 L.Ed. 485; Moore v. Robbins, 96 U.S. 530, 24 L.Ed. 848)that the administrative cancellation power established by Cameron and the other cases cited is confined to so-called equitable interests, and that a lease, which is said to resemble more closely the legal interest conveyed by a land patent, is not subject to such power. We think that no matter how the interest conveyed is denominated the true line of demarcation is whether as a result of the transaction 'all authority or control' over the lands has passed from 'the Executive Department,' Moore v. Robbins, supra, at 533, of 96 U.S., or whether the Government continues to possess some measure of control over them.
Unlike a land patent, which divests the Government of title, Congress under the Mineral Leasing Act has not only reserved to the United States the fee interest in the leased land, but has also subjected the lease to exacting restrictions and continuing supervision by the Secretary. Thus, assignments and subleases must be approved by the Secretary, 30 U.S.C. 187; he may direct complete suspension of operations on the land, 30 U.S.C. 209, or require the lessee to operate under a cooperative or unit plan, 30 U.S.C. (Supp. IV, 1963), § 226(j); and he may prescribe, as he has, rules and regulations governing in minute detail all facets of the working of the land, 30 U.S.C. 189; 30 CFR, pt. 221. In short, a mineral lease does not give the lessee anything approaching the full ownership of a fee patentee, nor does it convey an unencumbered estate in the minerals.
Since the Secretary's connection with the land continues to subsist, he should have the power, in a proper case, to correct his own errors.
2. The first paragraph of § 31the one on which petitioner's case dependsspeaks entirely in terms of post-lease occurrences. Thus in providing that a lease may be forfeited in judicial proceedings 'whenever the lessee (not an applicant for a lease) fails to comply with any of the provisions of * * * (the Act), of the lease, or of the general regulations promulgated under * * * (the Act) and in force at the date of the lease * * *.' (emphasis added), the provision clearly assumes the existence of a valid lease. It therefore does not cover a situation where, as here, the lease has not been issued at the time the breach of the Act or regulations occurs, for their is at that time no lease to cancel.
3. The other forfeiture provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act, as originally enacted, are, with one partial exception, also all concerned with post-lease events. Thus cancellation of a lease in judicial proceedings was authorized when the lessee drilled within 200 feet of the lease boundary (§ 16, 41 Stat. 443), or failed to comply with the rpovision granting rights of way for pipelines through public lands (§ 28, 41 Stat. 449). And with respect to prospecting permits, administrative cancellation was authorized for the permittee's failure to exercise his prospecting rights with due diligence (§ 26, 41 Stat. 448).
The sole exception to this post-issuance scheme of forfeiture and only a partial one at thatis found in § 27, 41 Stat. 448, which provides for judicial forfeiture of interests in excess of certain minimum acreage allowances. But even here it is apparent that the statute was less concerned with initially invalid awards of excessive acreage than with the subsequent pooling of the interests of separate grantees, having the effect of avoiding the acreage limitation. Section 27 was in part born of fears that large oil companies might obtain a monopoly of the oil resources in public lands. See H.R. Rep. No. 206, 65th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 5.
4. The background of the Mineral Leasing Act also points against the likelihood that Congress intended to curtail the Secretary's general power respecting administrative cancellation of leases which had been invalidly issued (pp. 476478, supra).
It would thus be surprising to find in the Act, which was intended to expand, not contract, the Secretary's control over the mineral lands of the United States, a restriction on the Secretary's power to cancel leases issued through administrative errora power which was then already firmly established. See pp. 476478, supra. More particularly, we can perceive no reason why Congress should have given the Secretary authority to cancel administratively a prospecting permit (later a noncompetitive lease), § 26, 41 Stat. 448, on the basis of post-issuance events, but implicitly denied him that power in respect of pre-issuance occurrences.
The fragmentary excerpts of legislative history relied on by petitioner do not suggest an opposite conclusion. The comment that 'the Secretary of the Interior has no right or authority under the bill to cancel a lease' was made in the course of a discussion on the floor of the Senate about lands on which there were producing wells in existence, and it was assumed that there had been a post-issuance violation of the terms of the lease;
the Secretary here claims no authority to cancel a lease in such a situation. The remark in the House debates that 'there must be a showing made in court before the forfeiture can be secured' occurred in discussion relating to § 27 of the Act,
which is, as we have seen, a partial exception to the general scheme of forfeitures.
The power was first invoked with respect to prospecting permits, as to which the statute authorized administrative cancellation only on the basis of post-issuance breach (note 8, supra, and accompanying text). See, e.g., Leach v. Cornell, No. A 1687 (unpublished departmental decision, Aug. 13, 1921); McCarthy v. Son, No. A2398 (unpublished decision, Mar. 4, 1922); Murray v. McNabb, No. A4412 (unpublished decision, Feb. 14, 1923); Moon v. Woodrow, 51 I.D. 118 (1925); Drake v. Simmons, No. A16885 (unpublished decision, Oct. 28, 1932). Following the replacement of prospecting permits by noncompetitive leases in 1935 (note 8, supra), the same power was exercised with respect to them. See, e.g., Fenelon Boesche, No. A21230 (unpublished decision, Feb. 21, 1938); Reay v. Lackie, 60 I.D. 29 (1947); Iola Morrow, No. A27177 (unpublished decision, Oct. 10, 1955); R.S. Prows, 66 I.D. 19 (1959).
Although the Act, as it relates to oil and gas leases, has been amended a dozen times in the last 40 years,
Congress has never interfered with this long-continued administrative practice. The conclusion is plain that Congress, if it did not ratify the Secretary's conduct, at least did not regard it as inconsistent with the Mineral Leasing Act. Cf. Ivanhoe Irrig. Dist. v. McCracken, 357 U.S. 275, 293, 78 S.Ct. 1174, 2 L.Ed.2d 1313; Fleming v. Mohawk Co., 331 U.S. 111, 116, 67 S.Ct. 1129, 91 L.Ed. 1375; Billings v. Truesdell, 321 U.S. 542, 552553, 64 S.Ct. 737, 88 L.Ed. 917.
The present case is a peculiarly appropriate one for administrative determination in the first instance. At issue was simply the question whether petitioner's lease offer was defective because it failed to include an adjoining 40-acre tract under application by another party, and this question had already been decided adversely to petitioner's position by the Secretary in a previous case interpreting the governing departmental regulations. Natalie Z. Shell, supra. Matters of this nature do not warrant initial submission to the judicial process. Indeed the magnitude and complexity of the leasing program conducted by the Secretary
make it likely that a seriously detrimental effect on the prompt and efficient administration of both the public domain and the federal courts might well be the consequence of a shift from the Secretary to the courts of the power to cancel such defective leases.
Recognition of the Secretary's power here serves to protect the public interest in the administration of the public domain. Cancellation of this kind of erroneously issued lease gives effect to regulations designed to check the undue splitting up of tracts, which might facilitate frauds, hinder the development of oil and gas resources, and render supervision very burdensome. See Annie Dell Wheatley, 62 I.D. 292, 293294 (1955). In addition, exercise of the administrative power in cases of this type safeguards the statutory rights of conflicting claimants.
In the day-to-day operation of the Bureau of Land Management, the managers of the local land offices act on each lease application in chronological sequence. If the land is available, if the applicant is qualified, and if the application appears to conform to the regulations, a lease will issue. In due course the manager will come to conflicting applications for the same land. If a later applicant is not the first qualified, his application will be denied. The notice of denial will probably afford the first occasion for an applicant to investigate whether he was in truth the first qualified applicant, and to appeal on this ground to the Director of the Bureau of Land Management and the Secretary of the Interior. Thus, given the nature of the land office's business, the power of cancellation, at least while conflicting applications are pending, is essential to secure the rights of competing applicants.
In so holding we do not open the door to administrative abuses. The regulations of the Department of the Interior provide for adversary proceedings on appeals taken within the Department where other private parties will be affected by the decision. See generally 43 CFR, pt. 221. Appeal is of right, 43 CFR §§ 221.1, 221.31, the appellant is required to notify his opponent, 43 CFR §§ 221.4, 221.34, and the latter has full rights of participation, 43 CFR §§ 221.5221.6, 221.35. And final action by the Secretary, see 43 CFR § 221.37, has always been subject to judicial review. 30 U.S.C. (Supp. IV, 1963), § 2262; see, e.g., Noble v. Union River Logging R. Co., 147 U.S. 165, 13 S.Ct. 271, 37 L.Ed. 123; Moore v. Robbins, supra.
R.S. § 441, 5 U.S.C. 485, charges the Secretary 'with the supervision of public business relating to * * * (p)ublic lands, including mines.' He is directed by R.S. § 453, 43 U.S.C. 2, to 'perform * * * all executive duties * * * in anywise respecting * * * public lands (of the United States),' and R.S. § 2478, 43 U.S.C. 1201, authorizes him 'to enforce and carry into execution, by appropriate regulations, every part of the provisions of * * * (the Title dealing with public lands) not otherwise specially provided for.'
'The rule is established by innumerable decisions of this Court, and of state and lower federal courts, that, when the location of a mining claim is perfected under the law, it has the effect of a grant by the United States of the right of present and exclusive possession. The claim is property in the fullest sense of that term; and may be sold, transferred, mortgaged, and inherited without infringing any right or title of the United States. The right of the owner is taxable by the state; and is 'real property,' subject to the lien of a judgment * * *. The owner is not required to purchase the claim or secure patent from the United States; but, so long as he complies with the provisions of the mining laws, his possessory right, for all practical purposes of ownership, is as good as though secured by patent.' Wilbur v. United States ex rel. Krushnic, 280 U.S. 306, 316317, 50 S.Ct. 103, 104, 74 L.Ed. 445.
The Secretary, in his brief (pp. 1213), informs us that on June 30, 1960, there were 139,000 outstanding leases supervised by the Department of the Interior under the Mineral Leasing Act which covered 113,000,000 acres. The total number of outstanding leases supervised by the Department under all programspublic lands, acquired lands, Indian, Naval Petroleum Reserve and Outer Continental Shelfwas 159,000, covering 125,000,000 acres.
Petitioner contends that if an administrative cancellation proceeding is permitted to the Secretary, it would be imprudent for a lessee, since his interest would thus be precarious, to assume the financial risk of developing his lease, and therefore the effective term of his lease would be curtailed even if he were finally held to be the first qualified applicant. But the same delayand perhaps even a longer onewould result if the Secretary were remitted to judicial proceedings for cancellation.