Court Opinion

ID: 9418258
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:17:43.572561+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:21:59.425544
License: Public Domain

The Chief Justice
concurring.
Agreeing in every particular with the conclusions of the court and with its reasoning except as to one special sub- ■ ject, my concurrence as to that matter because of its importance is separately stated. The matter to which I refer is the exclusion of the Uncle Sam Oil Company from the operation of the act. The view which leads the court • to exclude it is that the company was not engaged in transportation under the statute, a conclusion to which I do not assent. The facts are these: That company owns wells in one State from which it has pipe lines to its refinery in another State, and pumps its own oil through such pipe lines to its refinery and the product of course when reduced at the refinery passes into the markets of consumption. It seems to me that the business thus carried on is transportation in interstate commerce within the statute. But despite this I think the company is not *563embraced by the statute because it would be impossible to make the statute applicable to it without violating the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, since to apply it would necessarily amount to a taking of the property of the company without compensation. It is shown beyond question that the company buys no oil and. by the methods which have been mentioned simply carries its own product to its own refinery; in other words, it is engaged in a purely private business. Under these conditions in my opinion there is no power under 'the Constitution without the exercise of the right of eminent domain to convert without its consent the private business of the company into a public one.
Of course this view has no application to the other companies which the court holds are subject to the act because as pointed out the principal ones were chartered as common carriers and they all either directly or as a necessary result of their association were engaged in buying oil and shipping it through their pipes; in other words, were doing in reality a common carrier business, disguised, it may be, in form, but not changed in substance. Under these conditions I do not see how it would be possible to avoid the conclusion which the court has reached without declaring that the shadow and not the substance was the criterion to be resorted to for the purpose of determining the validity of the exercise of legislative power.