Court Opinion

ID: 9478887
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:01:32.055945+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:40.779337
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join Judge Browning’s excellent opinion, which correctly resolves this case according to established principles of administrative law. I write separately to comment on a more general problem raised by Judge Beezer’s thoughtful dissent.
Judge Beezer is concerned that the ICC has accorded more weight to intangible factors (the community’s future need for rail transportation) than to hard financial data (the fact that Southern Pacific could earn a greater return by investing its money elsewhere). He is also troubled because the ICC has failed to provide “a thorough explanation of why the factors of continued profitability, adverse community and shipper impact, and alternate transportation services outweigh an opportunity cost to SPT of $1,442,637 per year.” Dissent at 3015. Judge Beezer’s concern is well-founded, but the problem he raises is not unique to this case; it accompanies all judicial review of economic regulation.
If there were no ICC, railroads would abandon lines when they decided that they could make more money investing their resources elsewhere. Such market-based decisions allocate resources to their highest-valued use. Almost by definition, an ICC decision not to permit abandonment will be inefficient; if economic efficiency were our only concern, we would let the railroads do whatever they think best.
Once we abandon efficiency as the benchmark, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to come up with objectively verifiable criteria by which to review ICC decisions. The Commission must make an apples-and-oranges comparison: The community’s needs and the railroad’s balance sheet cannot be measured against a common standard. There is no way to tell whether an ICC decision is right or wrong unless it is extremely wrong; indeed, the labels right and wrong lose most of their meaning. Whenever the government intervenes in the economy, government officials must weigh the benefits to one group against the harms to another. It is a rare case when the objects in the balance can be made commensurable.
This is why the courts can play only a limited role in this process. We defer to the judgment of the ICC in part because of the Commissioners’ expertise, but even more so because the types of policy judgments the ICC makes are quite unlike those that courts are equipped to make. We have no standards by which to judge the ICC’s determination that, in a given case, the needs of the community outweigh the railroad’s interests. Accordingly, we do not — cannot—second-guess the judgment of the ICC; more active review would embroil the federal courts in questions of interest-group balancing reserved for the political branches of government.
The lack of objective standards by which to evaluate ICC decisions forces us to focus on process rather than substance. It narrows our role in another way as well: It limits the degree of rational explanation we can legitimately require from the ICC. The Commission can recite the information before it, summarize the contentions of the parties, assess credibilities and analyze the data submitted to it, but at some point it must make a policy decision whether or not to permit the abandonment. No matter how exhaustive the Commission’s analysis, no matter how thorough its review of the record, its decision cannot be made to flow inexorably from a set of facts and legal principles. Regardless of how fully the facts and principles are explained, the decision remains at bottom a political one.
This is a case in point. Judge Beezer, echoing the persuasive dissents of Chairman Gradison and Commissioner Andre, finds the evidence cited by the ICC majority to be intangible and speculative. So do I. But the needs of the community will always be less tangible than the financial condition of the railroad; to discount intangible evidence would be to rule in the rail*845road’s favor in the vast majority of cases. The ICC has balanced the tangible against the intangible, found the intangible to predominate and articulated a rational basis for that decision. We have no business asking for anything more.