Court Opinion

ID: 9487652
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:23:13.397334+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:24.979843
License: Public Domain

SILBE RMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I completely agree with the majority’s analysis and join the opinion. I am nevertheless dubitante not because of any concern as to its reasoning or its reading of MCI Telecommunications Corp. v. American Tel. & Tel. Co., - U.S. -, 114 S.Ct. 2223, 129 *1527L.Ed.2d 182 (1994), but rather because I simply cannot square the Court’s treatment of statutory filed rate provisions in MCI and Maislin Industries, U.S. v. Primary Steel, 497 U.S. 116, 110 S.Ct. 2759, 111 L.Ed.2d 94 (1990) with Security Servs. v. Kmart Corp., — U.S. -, 114 S.Ct. 1702, 128 L.Ed.2d 433 (1994). See Maislin, 497 U.S. at 121, 110 S.Ct. at 2763. It is rather obvious that a number of justices are not comfortable with the hard logic of Maislin, requiring adherence to filed rates and invalidating inconsistent negotiated rates; Justice Stevens is rather persistent in his disapproval of that opinion, see Kmart, — U.S. at -, 114 S.Ct. at 1710 (Stevens, J. concurring). And the dissenters along with Justice Stevens in MCI apparently wish to apply the reasoning of Maislin flexibly to the telecommunications industry, relaxing the filed rate doctrine to allow the agency free pursuit of desirable policy goals. See MCI, — U.S. at -, 114 S.Ct. at 2234.
The real difficulty, however, is the majority opinion in Kmart. I quite agree with Justice Ginsburg that “[i]t is difficult to regard the Commissioner’s approach, and the Court’s approval of it, as anything other than an end-run around the filed rate doctrine so recently and firmly upheld in Maislin.” Kmart, — U.S. at -, 114 S.Ct. at 1717 (Ginsburg, J. dissenting). The ICC, obviously distressed with Maislin — which permitted a trustee of a bankrupt carrier to insist on recovering the filed rate against a shipper even if the carrier had negotiated a lower rate with that shipper — came up with a gimmick to get around that case. The Commission fortuitously discovered that over 40% of all carriers whose tariffs referred to Mileage Guides published by a Household Goods Carriers’ Bureau (HGCB) had neglected to keep a current “power of attorney” on file with the Bureau or had failed to pay a nominal fee to the Bureau. The Commission’s void for “non-participation” regulation stated that “[ajbsent effective concurrences or powers of attorneys, tariffs are void as a matter of law.” 49 C.F.R. § 1312.4(d) (1993). Accordingly, the Commission held that a carrier in that position no longer had an “effective” tariff on file even though there could be no real doubt as to the rate or mileage of the carrier’s tariffs. If a power of attorney had lapsed, the tariff became ineffective even though the technical defect went entirely unnoticed at the time of filing or lapse. The Court upheld this invalidation of filed tariffs, describing the filed rates as “laek[ing] an essential element” and insufficient “to support a reliable calculation of charges.” See Kmart, — U.S. at -, 114 S.Ct. at 1708, 1710.
That interpretation of the Commission’s regulation and its application to tariffs thought by both carriers and shippers to be effective was, as both Justice Thomas and Justice Ginsburg pointed out, in contravention of the Court’s prior opinion, ICC v. American Trucking Assoc., 467 U.S. 354, 104 S.Ct. 2458, 81 L.Ed.2d 282 (1984). In that case the Court had held that the Commission could not under most circumstances as part of its statutory authority to “reject” filed tariffs reach back and “invalidate tariffs that it had accepted for filing without objection.” Overland Express v. ICC, 996 F.2d 356, 359 (D.C.Cir.1993), vacated and remanded, — U.S. -, 114 S.Ct. 2095, 128 L.Ed.2d 658 (1994). The majority in Kmart, however, stated that the Commission had not really acted “retroactively,” as it had in American Trucking because the tariff became invalid only after the power of attorney lapsed in accordance with the pre-existing nonpartici-pation rule. See Kmart, — U.S. at -, 114 S.Ct. at 1709. Yet American Trucking did not bar retroactive rulemaking or deal with retroactivity in its classic sense, see Georgetown University Hosp. v. Bowen, 862 F.2d 323 (D.C.Cir.1988) (Georgetown II). It prevented the Commission from second-guessing the validity of an existing tariff as the basis for shipping charges long after it had been published except under limited circumstances (la, in furtherance of a specific statutory mandate). See American Trucking, 467 U.S. at 362-64, 367, 104 S.Ct. at 2463-64, 2465. In American Trucking the Commission invalidated a published tariff because it was thought to be the product of unauthorized collusive activity. The Court examined the Commission’s action under this strict standard (and, incidentally, approved it in that ease), but according to the logic of Kmart, the Commission could just as easily have held that a tariff stemming from such a *1528process was ineffective ab initio and therefore did not implicate the filed rate doctrine or notions of retroactivity.
The Court in Kmart analogized the Commission’s interpretation of its non-participation regulation with the supposed parallel treatment of an expiration date on a tariff. See Kmart, — U.S. at -, 114 S.Ct. at 1709. With all due respect, that analogy is rather tenuous. When a carrier puts an expiration date on his tariff, he indicates quite clearly that he will no longer charge that rate after the expiration date, and the shipper will certainly take notice of that fact. The difficulty with the ICC’s application of the non-participation regulation is that the Commission relied on a latent procedural defect that typically would have been overlooked to invalidate entirely the published tariff, thus avoiding the consequences of Maislin.
Since the reasoning of the Kmart opinion is so unpersuasive, I am inclined to believe that Justice Ginsburg’s explanation regarding the Court’s circumvention of Maislin is correct. Therefore I lack confidence that the Court will adhere to the logic of Maislin and MCI when again faced with consequences that appear undesirable ex post.