Source: http://www.chanrobles.com/usa/us_supremecourt/311/132/case.php
Timestamp: 2018-06-20 09:14:52
Document Index: 49186857

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 402', '§ 310', '§ 310', '§ 16', '§ 402', '§ 402', '§ 310']

Insofar as action of the Federal Communications Commission is subject to judicial review, the Act bifurcates access to the lower federal courts according to the nature of the subject matter before the Commission. Barring the exceptions immediately to be noted, § 402(a) assimilates chanroblesvirtualawlibrary
The crux of the controversy is whether an order of the Commission, in the exercise of its authority under § 310(b), denying consent to an assignment of a radio station license is an order "refusing an application . . . for chanroblesvirtualawlibrary
Primarily, our task is to read what Congress has written. As a matter of common speech, the excepted types of orders which alone can come before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia do not include an order refusing the consent required by § 310(b). Refusing "an application . . . for a radio station license" is hardly an apt way to characterize refusal to assent to the transfer of such a license from an existing holder. Nor is there anything to indicate that the peculiar idiom of the industry or of administrative practice has modified chanroblesvirtualawlibrary
What thus appears clear from a reading of the Communications Act itself is not modified by the collateral materials which have been pressed upon us. That both sides invoke the same extrinsic aids, one to fortify and the other to nullify the conclusion we have reached, in itself, proves what dubious light they shed. What was said in Committee Reports and some remarks by the proponent of the measure in the Senate are sufficiently ambiguous, insofar as this narrow issue is concerned, to invite mutually destructive dialectic, but not strong enough either to strengthen or weaken the force of what chanroblesvirtualawlibrary
Congress has enacted. See Sen.Rep. No. 781, 73d Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 9-10; House Rep. No.1918, 73d Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 49-50; 78 Cong.Rec. 8825-26. This leaves for consideration only the bearing of an earlier decision by the Court of Appeals for the District on this very question, arising under the predecessor of the Communications Act, the Radio Act of 1927, 44 Stat. 1162, as amended, 46 Stat. 844. In that Act, § 16 covered, for present purposes, the provisions of § 402(b) of the Communications Act. Inter alia, it provided for appeals to the court below by "any applicant for a station license." Construing that provision, the court below, in Pote v. Federal Radio Commission, 62 App.D.C. 303, 67 F.2d 509, held that it was without jurisdiction over an appeal by a transferee to whom consent to a transfer had been denied. The present § 402 was adopted after this decision and another decision by the same court within this field of jurisdiction (Goss v. Federal Radio Commission, 62 App.D.C. 301, 67 F.2d 507) had been presumably brought to the attention of Congress. Hearings on S. 2910, 73d Cong., 2d Sess., pp. 44-45. On the one hand, it is insisted that, in the light of these circumstances, the construction in the Pote decision was impliedly enacted by Congress, while respondents urge that differences in the provisions regarding the Commission's power over consent to transfers destroy the significance of the Pote case. But these changes in § 310(b), which stiffened the control of the Commission over transfers, are wholly unrelated to the technical question of jurisdiction with which we are now concerned. We are not, however, willing to rest decision on any doctrine concerning the implied enactment of a judicial construction upon reenactment of a statute. The persuasion that lies behind that doctrine is merely one factor in the total effort to give fair meaning to language. And so, at the lowest, the Pote case certainly chanroblesvirtualawlibrary