Opinion ID: 307053
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Proper Retroactivity

Text: 16 Since the FPC erred in not immediately reopening the proceeding, its orders of 5 May and 18 May 1971 should have corrected that error. If the policy of the Natural Gas Act is not arbitrarily to be defeated by uncorrected Commission error, the Association must be put in the same position that it would have occupied had the error not been made. 17 The measure of the retroactivity which the Commission must grant to cure its legal error is the time elapsed between its wrongful dismissal of the Section 5 case and the time it cured that error by vacating the dismissal and reopening the hearings. This period, from 17 October 1969 to 6 February 1970, constitutes 112 days. 18 The grant of retroactive relief for this period does not conflict with the anti-reparations language in the statute. 14 That language was designed to protect established expectations under legally established rate schedules. It forbids belated determinations that rates charged in the past were excessive. The Supreme Court has noted that [g]as purchasers . . . have no protection from excessive charges collected during the pendency of a Sec. 5 proceeding. 15 However, there is no reason to extend that principle to say that gas purchasers have no protection against a legal error by the Commission which wrongfully and unfairly prolongs that pendency. 19 What the Commission must do on remand here is to compensate for its erroneous dismissal. Rather than reexamining the legality of the rates charged prior to its order of 5 May 1971, the FPC will merely be admitting that, all other stages of the proceeding remaining constant, its prospective order should have occurred 112 days earlier. AT cannot claim justifiable reliance or protectable expectations based on FPC action which was illegal. Since the legal error causing the delay was sought by and benefitted AT, it cannot reasonably complain of its correction, at its expense, now.