Court Opinion

ID: 9422060
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:01:03.889436+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:34.039932
License: Public Domain

*159Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring in the dissent.*
In joining Mr. Justice Harlan's opinion I should like to add a word by way of emphasis.
Once analysis of the problem of these two cases, relating as they do exclusively to independent producers of natural gas, is stripped of darkening details and reduced to its statutory determinants, as spelled out in my Brother Harlan's dissent, the answer becomes clear and uncomplicated. If a licensing agency has power to grant a particular kind of license, an applicant has the right to apply for such a license. It may be withheld without ado only if the agency has arbitrary — judicially unreviewable — power to withhold such a license. Concededly the Commission has power to grant a time-limited certificate, and its denial of such a certificate is not free from judicial review. Therefore it must give a reason for denying a proper application, with due regard, of course, to its wide discretionary power for determining what satisfies “public convenience and necessity.” The Commission cannot rest denial on its ipse dixit. Nor can the Commission rest on the general spirit or the ultimate purposes of the Natural Gas Act, for to do so amounts to saying that the Act forbids time certificates, when in fact it does not.

[These opinions apply also to No. 321, Sun Oil Co. v. Federal Power Comm’n, post, p. 170.]