Court Opinion

ID: 9420005
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:30.525693+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:21.700187
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting.
In a case involving issues much narrower than those now here, the Court, only the other day, struck down an order of the Interstate Commerce Commission for want of adequate findings. Interstate Commerce Commission v. Mechling, 330 U. S. 567, at 583. Although in that case there were explicit findings, the Court deemed them inadequate because they were based on “unsifted averages.” In a series of cases the Court has set aside orders of the Interstate Commerce Commission because of the failure of the Commission to ascertain and to formulate with clarity and definiteness the transportation and economic circumstances which alone could justify the order, and thereby afford this Court assured basis for concluding that the Commission had duly exercised its allowable judgment on the factors underlying the ultimate issues. See Florida v. United States, 282 U. S. 194; United States v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 293 U. S. 454; Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe R. Co. v. United States, 295 U. S. 193; United States v. Carolina Freight Carriers Corp., 315 U. S. 475; City of Yonkers v. United States, 320 U. S. 685; Eastern-Central Motor Carriers Association v. United States, 321 U. S. 194; North Carolina v. United States, 325 U. S. 507; Alabama *352v. United States, 325 U. S. 535. Not one of these cases involved an order having a reach comparable to the reach of the order now before us. We are asked to sustain an order that readjusts the class rates of the whole country barring only the territory west of the Rockies — -an order that changes not only the rates within the various rate territories in this vast region, but changes the relation of the rates inter-territorially. I am not unmindful of the complicated nature of the problem which confronted the Commission, of the empiric character of the process of rate-making, of the limited scope for judicial review in this process, of the respect to be accorded to the Commission’s conclusions. Board of Trade v. United States, 314 U. S. 534. But when the outcome of legal issues is bound to cut deeply into economic relations on such a scale, it is not asking too much to ask the Commission to be explicit and definite in its findings on the elements that are indispensable to the validity of its order.
When inter-territorial discrimination is complained of, at least two basic issues confront the Commission: (1) Is there discrimination? (2) If there is, how is the discrimination to be abated? The Commission cannot eliminate discrimination — i. e., harmonize the rate relations between territories — in disregard of the reasonableness of the readjusted rates within each territory. The Interstate Commerce Act must be applied in its entirety and the different sections which make an articulated whole cannot be treated disjointedly. Such is the teaching of our cases, especially of Texas & Pacific R. Co. v. Abilene Cotton Oil Co., 204 U. S. 426, and Intermountain Rate Cases, 234 U. S. 476—the two cases which beyond all others give the controlling considerations in construing the Interstate Commerce Act.
And so the Commission is not empowered to remove discrimination between two territories without at the same time considering whether the remedies proposed for such *353removal fit the requirement of reasonableness of rates. It may not lower the rates in a territory beyond the level which gives the carriers an income sufficient to enable them to operate effectively as part of the nation’s transportation system. And the Commission may not raise rates to a level which would exact freight charges from shippers beyond a rate structure that is reasonable. The small proportion of freight that moves on class rates is no measure of the importance of those rates to the total earnings of carriers. Unreasonable rates — whether unreasonably high or unreasonably low — even on a fraction of the freight, may make the difference between earnings to which carriers are entitled under the Interstate Commerce Act and those to which they are not entitled for discharging their duty as part of the national transportation system. We are without informing findings on these issues. But even if one were to consider questions of discrimination in isolation, inequality — the essence of discrimination — cannot be dealt with mechanically by taking a percentage off one territory and adding it to another. The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals. The findings do not reveal how it happened that putting 10% on and taking 10% off respectively will beget just the right adjustment. I am not suggesting that one might not dig out of the record inexplicit, argumentative support for the view that an increase of 10% in Official Classification Territory rates will still leave the level of rates within that Territory not unreasonable, and that a decrease of 10% in Western Territory will leave the carriers the required reasonableness of rates within that Territory. But it is not conducive to a fair administration of the Interstate Commerce Act, nor is it consonant with the proper discharge of this Court’s task, to require us to dig out indications or evidence giving appropriate answer to these issues from a record consisting of nearly 13,000 pages spread over *35421 volumes, which led to a report by the Commission of 320 pages.
The District Court acknowledged the absence of finding on such issues. Said the court: “it has been argued that there can be no increase in class rates in Official Territory unless there is first a so-called primary finding, supported by substantial evidence that the present rates are not compensatory. While that fact, if proved, would have been of much significance the failure to prove it and the consequent lack of a finding that present rates are confiscatory does not leave the Commission’s finding that the rates are unlawful unsupported by substantial evidence.” 65 F. Supp. 856, 873. But the fact that the rates in Official Territory may, as a matter of abstract comparison, be out of line with the rates in Western or Southern Territory is hardly proof that the rates in Official Territory should be increased by the same flat percentage as the rates in the other territories should be decreased. Such a flat increase in Official Territory may make the proposed new rates unlawful because unreasonable. While a 10% decrease in rates in Western Territory may eliminate unfairness to shippers in that territory, it does not follow that a corresponding 10% increase in Official Territory rates will not result in unfairness to shippers there.
One can hardly read the concurring and dissenting views to the Commission’s Report without being left with uncertainty regarding the basis of the Commission’s order.
“The report does not show, except in nebulous fashion, that the cost figures represent apportionment of totals, based on estimates; that they involve many assumptions and acts of judgment; and are not computations from direct, original cost figures for particular movements. These, however, are the facts. It omits evidence showing that 59 out of 117 items of basic data used in the studies were estimated, and that 458 out of 500 sequences were wholly or partly estimated. *355It fails to disclose clearly that when making the studies it was assumed that the consist of the traffic is the same in the different territories, when the fact is, as I have pointed out, that the traffic consist differs widely in the respective territories. The result is that theoretical costs are produced, based upon assumptions which are not facts, and upon comparisons of unlike things.” (Commissioner Porter, dissenting, 262 I. C. C. 447, 709, 717; and see dissenting views of Commissioner Barnard, id. at 725.)
According to two of the Commissioners the record is wholly inadequate to support a finding that class rates within Official Territory are unreasonable under § 1 of the Act. See 264 I. C. C. 69-70. Certainly the Commission did not make an explicit finding that they are unreasonable. If there is any such finding, it must be sought for as would a needle in a haystack. The Commission’s order ought not to be allowed to rest on such dubious foundations.
Nor can such a mechanical or abstractly mathematical readjustment of rates inter-territorially be justified as a tentative adjustment. Of course, the Commission may generalize a sufficient number of typical instances and make a fiat readjustment within a territory, leaving instances of unreasonableness to be taken out of such an order upon individual application. This is what the Commission did, and what this Court sustained, in the New England Divisions Case, 261 U. S. 184. The order in that case, directing a 15% increase in the share of the New England railroads in the joint through-freight rates, was based upon evidence “which the Commission assumed was typical in character, and ample in quantity, to justify the finding made in respect to each division of each rate of every carrier.” 261 U. S. at 196-97. The Court found that the established practice in rate litigation, the nature of the hearing before the Commission, the evidence submitted, the findings made, the opportunities to *356apply for modifications in typical situations, amply supported the Commission’s findings. The present record, as reflected in the Commission’s report, does not present a comparable situation. One gets the impression that the adjustment of a flat 10% decrease in the rates outside the Official Territory and a flat increase of 10% within that Territory is attributable, fundamentally, to a laudable desire on the part of the Commission to secure uniform classification throughout the country. The Commission was not prepared to make such a classification, but it made these rate changes in the hope that they would exert pressure on the carriers to agree upon a uniform classification. It is in relation to that hope that it is urged that the order is merely a conditional or tentative order — conditioned upon agreement by the carriers upon a uniform classification. But to condition the order on the realization of that hope is to condition it, if experience be any guide, on the Greek kalends.
What this Court said in United States v. Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific R. Co., 294 U. S. 499, 510-11, involving a rate adjustment within a very limited territory, with no such far-reaching consequences as the order now under review, has enhanced applicability to the present order of the Commission. “We would not be understood as saying that there do not lurk in this report phrases or sentences suggestive of a different meaning. One gains at places the impression that the Commission looked upon the proposed reduction [initiated by a carrier] as something more than a disruptive tendency .... The difficulty is that it has not said so with the simplicity and clearness through which a halting impression ripens into reasonable certitude. In the end we are left to spell out, to argue, to choose between conflicting inferences. Something more precise is requisite in the quasi-jurisdictional findings of an administrative agency. Beaumont, S. L. & W. Ry. Co. v. United States, 282 U. S. 74, 86; Florida v. *357United States, 282 U. S. 194, 215. We must know what a decision means before the duty becomes ours to say whether it is right or wrong.”
Administrative experts no doubt have antennae not possessed by courts charged with reviewing their action. And so it may well be that to the expert feel the justifiable correction of an imbalance between Official Territory rates and the rates of other territories is a shift of 10% in the respective rates — Official Territory rates increased 10% and rates elsewhere decreased 10%. But courts, charged as they are with the review of the action of the Commission, ought not to be asked to sustain such a mathematical coincidence as a matter of unillumined faith in the conclusion of the experts.
I would reverse the decree and order the proceedings returned to the Interstate Commerce Commission.