Court Opinion

ID: 9642443
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:58:18.766868+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:47.867513
License: Public Domain

HUTCHESON, Circuit Judge
(concurring specially).
I concur in all that is said in Judge SIMONS’ excellent opinion. I think, though, that the short and simple answer to appellant’s claim of jurisdiction is to be found in the fact that Section 251 of the Public Utility Holding Company Act, 15 U.S.C.A. § 79y, .which defines the jurisdiction of the federal courts with respect to suits brought by the commission does not grant jurisdiction of a suit of this kind. I write this brief concurrence to say so. I think it may not be doubted that this section and Sections 11(d) (e) (f) and 18(d) (f), which state the circumstances and the manner in which the commission can apply to the courts for relief, were intended to be, and are, as to jurisdiction, both inclusive and exclusive. A word by word examination of these sections makes it clear that nothing in them authorizes the suit here brought. Indeed, the commission in its brief disclaims them as the jurisdictional basis of the suit. In my view, this disclaimer, in the light of the settled rule of law that a statutory scheme intended to be all inclusive must be treated as exclusive also, settles the controversy against the commission. For it is of the essence of such a scheme that what is not included is excluded.2 The commission, therefore, in asserting a roving commission to sue for, or as, the United States, cf. In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 15 S.Ct. 900, 39 L.Ed. 1092, finds itself confronted with the difficulty, inherent in efforts to induce a court, of special jurisdiction to embark upon the exercise of jurisdiction, vague in its generality, and general in its vagueness. But this is not all. It finds itself confronted with the difficulty of attempting to sue out of the character with which the law has invested it, of invoking a jurisdiction beyond that to which the statute, by especially defining, has limited it. It seems quite clear to me that unless we are now to abandon in favor of notions completely alien to our system of law, the settled doctrines of federal jurisdiction and of statutory construction prevailing here, we must say: that the commission is the creature of statute; that it lives and moves and has its being by statutory authority alone, and only within statutory confines; that the creature may not say to its creator, “Why hast thou created me thus?”; and that the commission may not, therefore, by any kind of mysterious metempsychosis, become disembodied from, and disenthralled of, the statute which gives it life, to sue not as creature but as creator, in short, as the United States itself. Because then the statute of its creation does not grant, but in effect denies, the jurisdiction invoked, I am in no doubt that the district judge was -right and that his judgment should be affirmed.

 Section 25 provides:
“The District Courts of the United States, the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, and the United States courts of any Territory or other .place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States shall have jurisdiction of violations of this title or the rules, regulations, or orders thereunder, and, concurrently with State and Territorial courts, of all suits in equity and actions at law brought to enforce any liability or duty created by, or to enjoin any violation of, this title or the rules, regulations, or orders thereunder. Any criminal proceeding may be brought in the district-wherein any act or transaction constituting the violation occurred. Any suit or action to enforce any liability or duty created by, or to enjoin any violation of, this tifie or rules, regulations, or orders thereunder, may be brought in any such district or in the district wherein the defendant is an inhabitant or transacts business, and process in such cases may be served in any district of which the defendant is an inhabitant or transacts business or wherever the defendant may be found. Judgments and decrees so rendered shaE be subject to review as provided in sections 128 and 240 of the Judicial Code, as amended (U.S.C. title 28, secs. 225 and 347), and section 7, as amended, of-the Act entitled ‘An Act to estabhsh a court of appeals for the District of Columbia’, approved February 9, 1893 (D.C.Code, Title 18, Sec. 26). No costs shaE be assessed for or against the Commission in any proceeding under this title brought by or against the 'Commission in any court.”

 Posey v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 5 Cir., 93 F.2d 726; Tennessee Valley Authority v. Kinzer, 6 Cir., 142 F.2d 833; Breeding v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 243 Ala. 240, 9 So.2d 6.