Court Opinion

ID: 9530377
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:59:22.653319+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:28:05.555092
License: Public Domain

Mr. PRESIDING JUSTICE CRAVEN, dissenting: I dissent. As I understand the majority opinion, the only function it will serve will be to confound students of procedure for some time to come. The Commerce Commission acted upon an application for a rate increase by the Union Electric Company. That administrative proceeding was the subject of judicial review in the circuit court of Jersey County. While that case was there pending, the Commission acted on another rate increase and the circuit court found that the pending judicial review proceeding was moot, and I might add, that it was classically moot, all matters in controversy having been resolved by subsequent events that were then untouchable. So the trial court did what it was in fact required to do under an earlier mandate of this court in exactly a like case involving the same parties. That is to say, it dismissed the appeal as moot but it also affirmed the order of the Commission as it related to a now extinct rate matter. The trial court did not reach anything relative to the merits of the issue. The majority opinion acting in what I consider to be misplaced reliance upon Maywood Park Trotting Association, Inc. v. Illinois Harness Racing Com. (1959), 15 Ill. 2d 559, 155 N.E.2d 626, does a very strange thing. It reverses the trial court’s dismissal of this case as moot and remands the case to the trial court with directions to dismiss the appeal as moot. In between the opening paragraph and the end, the majority does something that I think is totally impermissible — it rather gratuitously gives some advice on rate-making which is obviously not relevant to the mere dismissal of the case. We should do what the trial court did — dismiss this case as moot.