Court Opinion

ID: 9521836
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:13:01.066951+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:01:17.066503
License: Public Domain

Mr. JUSTICE CRAVEN, dissenting: If I were free to decide this case unfettered by precedent in this jurisdiction, I would agree with the majority opinion. The reasonable development of the law makes it necessary, however, that those of us who serve as judges of intermediate courts pay some attention to, and follow, the holdings of supreme court opinions. It does not matter that the supreme court opinion is old and unloved. We are supposed to follow it anyway. I understand the state of the law in the vast majority of jurisdictions to be that a tariff filed and approved by the Commerce Commission or other similarly authorized regulatory body is binding upon the shipper and the carrier and there can be no deviation from such rates, even if the deviation is unintentional and certainly not if the deviation is designed to result in discrimination. The Federal rule is articulated in Louisville & Nashville R.R. Co. v. Maxwell (1915), 235 U.S. 94, 59 L. Ed. 853, 35 S. Ct. 494, and consistently applied. One need not recite State citations because they are collected and referred to in two annotations, 83 A.L.R. 245 (1933), and 88 A.L.R.2d 1375 (1963). Illinois, by reason of the Seitz case, marches to a different drummer. There is no way to distinguish Seitz. We can try. We can say it is old. We can say it has not been cited with approval. We can say cases involving similar issues have ignored it. We can say that the Illinois Supreme Court itself in Kirby v. Chicago & Alton R.R. Co. (1909), 242 Ill. 418, 90 N.E. 252, referred to Seitz in something other than glowing terms. But the holding in Seitz is there, unimpaired, not overruled, and not distinguishable. That holding is upon facts not materially distinguishable from those here. The Seitz case was decided in 1905, and the statute referred to related to the Interstate Commerce Commission. We are here concerned with the Illinois Commerce Commission. Seitz was decided prior to the adoption of sections 37 and 38 of the Public Utilities Act (Ill. Rev. Stat. 1977, ch. 111 2/3, pars. 37, 38). Such minor matters provide us with no way around the holding of Seitz. The orderly development of the law is that we should follow it, indeed as we are bound to do so, and at the same time express to the supreme court that were we free to do otherwise, we would join the other jurisdictions. It does not serve the orderly development of the law to merely note that the case is old and unloved and thus ignorable. I dissent.