Court Opinion

ID: 9597229
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:56:50.550063+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:54:04.421628
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Justice,
with whom HODGES and SUMMERS, JJ., join concurring in the judgment.
The essence of today’s opinion is that, when an assessment is to be made of a drilling activity’s conformity to the terms of a pooling order, the issue pressed for resolution lies within the Corporation Commission’s [Commission or agency] exclusive cognizance to “clarify” its prior orders and to “determine” their continuing efficacy. Because I find today’s pronouncement needlessly narrow and hence likely, once again, to eclipse the not-so-bright line of demarcation that must separate genuinely litigable district-court issues from agency jurisdiction, I can concur only in the judgment.
I
THE DISPUTE
Successive blowouts and mechanical problems required the operator to abandon the first two boreholes drilled at the well site. The third borehole was started after the date designated in the pooling order for the commencement of a well. While the operator took the position that its blowout-delayed drilling activity was being pursued in substantial conformity to the Commission-prescribed terms of the order, the owner [Nilsen] of a pooled leasehold urged in a district court “suit to quiet title” that the *104pooling order had expired by its own terms the moment the original [first] borehole was plugged. The dispositive issue here is, then, whether the assessment to be made of an operator’s drilling activity for its conformity to the agency order — an appraisal, whose outcome will yield an answer to whether the pooling order in question did become functus officio or remained efficacious — lies within the cognizance of the Commission or of the district court.
II
THE ESSENCE OF THIS CONTROVERSY PRESENTS AN AGENCY ISSUE
Whenever the parties’ conduct is to be assayed in terms of compliance with, or conformity to, the Commission-fashioned provisions of an outstanding regulatory order, the interests tendered for adversarial testing are those whose origin lie in the state’s exercise of its police power exerting itself through the medium of a pooling order.1 This inquiry calls for a declaration of rights created by the regulatory order rather than of interests derived from some private-law source. Because the district court is powerless either to construe or to review2 these decisions of the Commission, the Commission itself affords the only available tribunal for resolution of all those disputed claims in which the extent or viability of rights derived from the provisions of a pooling order must be measured by the yardstick of conformity to the Commission-prescribed terms.3
Ill
LEASEHOLD OWNER’S [NILSEN’S] SUIT TO QUIET TITLE IS A TRANSPARENT VERBAL CAMOUFLAGE FOR AN ACTION TO DECLARE, BY DISTRICT COURT JUDGMENT, THAT OPERATOR’S RIGHTS IN THE POOLING ORDER HAVE TERMINATED
This so-called suit to quiet title, as the trial judge readily saw, was in essence a *105statutorily-interdicted declaratory judgment action whose very institution and maintenance offend the terms of 12 O.S. 1981 § 1657.4 Nilsen clearly sought a judicial determination that the operator had lost its right to drill as a result of its failure to commence a well on or before the date designated in the pooling order. While a district court is authorized by law to remove a cloud created by a facially void agency order,5 it is absolutely powerless to declare rights arising under a facially efficacious regulatory order of the Commission.6 Moreover, no operator’s status may ever be conferred on a person or be transferred to another except by the Commission’s expressed sanction.7
Cases indicating that a district court may take cognizance of claims tendering issues regulatory in character whenever those issues can be decided without disturbing any Commission orders — see e.g. Southern Union Production Company v. Corporation Commission8 — fail to take into account the plain interdiction in 12 O.S. 1981 § 1657.9 Until its rather tardy appearance in the court’s opinion herein, the § 1657 interdiction went entirely unnoticed and unheeded by this court’s past jurisprudence.10 The provisions of both our constitutional and statutory law expressly prohibit the district court from declaring rights in Commission orders.11 While today’s opinion does curb the over-broad language of Southern Union,12 it will not brighten the fuzzy jurisdictional line by crisply separating genuine court issues from the agency’s exclusive regulatory cognizance.
The gravamen of every forensic dispute is to be drawn from its true essence rather than from the pleader’s circumlocution. A plaintiff’s attempt to dress up a controversy in the verbal garb of an equity suit to quiet title should not succeed if the issues pressed for resolution address the terms, construction, and effect of an agency order.13 An agency controversy will not be transmuted into a chancery contest by a clever draftsman’s adroit shifting of labels.14 This court must not countenance *106the energy bar’s quest for circumvention of the Commission’s statutory cognizance by permitting camouflaged declaratory-judgment or disguised quiet-title suits to go forward in violation of § 1657.15
I would hence hold that, because this controversy calls for a declaration of rights in a pooling order — a regulatory, public-law police power device — and the disputed claim requires an assessment of the operator’s drilling activities in terms of their conformity to the pooling order, the Commission has exclusive cognizance of the issues tendered in this so-called quiet title action.

, Anderson v. Corporation Commission, Okl., 327 P.2d 699, 703 [1958], app. dis., 358 U.S. 642, 79 S.Ct. 536, 3 L.Ed.2d 567 [1959].

. The declaratory ruling sought by Nilsen was within the direct prohibition of our constitutional and statutory law. Its explicit norms are contained in the following provisions:
(a) The district court is explicitly prohibited by statute from entertaining suits for declaration of rights acquired under an order of the Corporation Commission. The terms of 12 O.S. 1981 § 1657 provide: "This act [Uniform Declaratory Judgments Act] shall not be applicable to orders, judgments, or decrees made by the State Industrial Court, the Corporation Commission, or any other administrative agency, board or commission of the State of Oklahoma." [Emphasis added.]
(b) Our fundamental law, Art. 9 § 20, Okl. Const., denies, with equal clarity, to all courts, except the Supreme Court, the power to review Commission orders. Section 20 provides in pertinent part: “* * * No court of this State, except the Supreme Court, shall have jurisdiction to review, affirm, reverse, or remand any action of the Corporation Commission ... or to suspend or delay the execution or operation thereof, or to enjoin, reverse, or interfere with the Corporation Commission in the performance of its official duties; .... ”
(c) Commission orders made pursuant to the oil-and-gas conservation statutes may be reviewed only in the Supreme Court. See 52 O.S. 1981 §§ 111 and 113. Section 111 provides in pertinent part: "* * * No court of this state except the Supreme Court, and it only on appeal, as herein provided, shall have jurisdiction to review, reverse, annul, modify or correct any order, rule or regulation of the Commission within the general scope of its authority_” Section 113 provides in pertinant part: "* * * No order, rule, regulation, judgment or decree or final action of the Commission appealed from shall be superseded except by order of the Commission or the Supreme Court. * * *"

.Woods Petroleum Corporation v. Sledge, Okl., 632 P.2d 393, 394 [1981].
Post-order activities calling for an assessment of conformity of the operator's conduct to the agency order lie clearly within the Commission's cognizance. See (a) cases dealing with post-order controversies over conformity of drilling activities: Chancellor v. Tenneco Oil Co., Okl., 653 P.2d 204 [1982]; Crest Resources v. Corporation Commission, Okl., 617 P.2d 215 [1980]; Stipe v. Theus, Okl., 603 P.2d 347 [1979]; Shell Oil Company v. Keen, Okl., 355 P.2d 997 [1960] and Cabot Carbon Company v. Phillips Petroleum Company, Okl., 287 P.2d 675 [1955] and (b) cases addressing election-related post-order activities: Amarex, Inc. v. Baker, Okl., 655 P.2d 1040 [1983]; Woods Petroleum Corporation v. Sledge, supra; Buttram Energies, Inc. v. Corporation Commission, Etc., Okl., 629 P.2d 1252 [1981] and Gose v. Corporation Commission, Okl., 460 P.2d 118 [1969].

. See footnote 2(a) supra.

. Our jurisprudence limits district-court power over Commission orders to ascertaining whether the order is facially valid or void. Gulf-stream Petroleum Corporation v. Layden, Okl., 632 P.2d 376 [1981] and Chancellor v. Tenneco Oil Co., supra note 3 at 207. See also, McDaniel v. Moyer, Old., 662 P.2d 309, 312-313 [1983], When a pooling order is facially void for want of notice, a district court may declare it ineffective (Gulfstream Petroleum Corporation v. Lay-den, supra, and Chancellor v. Tenneco Oil Co., supra at note 3), but if the working interest owner, deprived of participation option by want of notice, seeks an opportunity to elect, the Commission appears to constitute the sole tribunal with power to grant relief. See Cravens v. Corporation Commission, Okl., 613 P.2d 442, 444 [1980] and Gose v. Corporation Commission, supra note 3.

. See footnote 2(a) supra.

. Crest Resources v. Corporation Commission, supra note 3 at 217.

. Okl., 465 P.2d 454 [1970], For an analysis and discussion of the jurisdictional confusion in the aftermath of Southern Union, supra, see Hart, Interpreting Corporation Commission Orders— Should the Commission be a Spectator or a Player?, 48 OBJ 1343 [1977].

. See footnote 2(a) supra.

. See footnote 8 supra.

. See footnote 2 supra.

. See footnote 8 supra.

. See Tenneco Oil Company v. El Paso Natural Gas Company, Okl., 687 P.2d 1049, 1056 [1984] (Opala. J., dissenting) and Samson Resources Co. v. Corporation Com'n., Okl., 702 P.2d 19, 24 [1985] (Opala, J., dissenting).

. In the process of drawing the sought-after bright line of jurisdictional demarcation, this court's inquiry should endeavor to separate agency issues of public-law content from controversies with a purely proprietary, private-law dimensional sweep. The line of demarcation to be drawn for separation of issues within the district court's cognizance from those which fall within the Corporation Commission's [Commission’s] jurisdiction lies along that often-difficult-to-chart boundary location where the statutory limit of the Commission’s regulatory power over the oil-and-gas industry meets with the periphery of the law’s still-preserved freedom to govern one's actions by contract alone. See Tenneco Oil Co. v. El Paso Natural Gas, (Opala, J., dissenting), supra note 13 at 1060.

. See footnote 2(a) supra.