Court Opinion

ID: 9570945
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:27:46.567939+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:24:07.506805
License: Public Domain

Judge PHILLIPS
concurring in the result.
I concur only in the result of the majority opinion. The reason the statute of limitations did not start to run until the Federal Communications Commission made plaintiffs stop operating their business, in my opinion, is that before then plaintiffs had not been damaged, had nothing to sue about, and an action would have been dismissible on its face. And whether plaintiffs ought to have known before then that the FCC could prevent them from operating as planned is immaterial since the record does not suggest, much less establish, that the ways of the FCC about matters of this kind are so predictable that communications law specialists, much less ordinary businessmen, should have known that the Commission would ban the activity involved. Instead, the record suggests that in opening, closing, or otherwise regulating the airways the FCC has the discretion to make and does make all kinds of exceptions and that its policies and practices can be as important to those *333subject to them as the wording of a regulation. Thus, whether defendants represented that they knew that the FCC’s policy was not to forbid operations like plaintiffs’, and whether plaintiffs had a right to rely thereon are issues of fact that the judge had no authority to decide.