Court Opinion

ID: 9419428
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:49:27.325521+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:18.057604
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting:
Congress has empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission to authorize a railroad, when public convenience permits, to abandon any portion of its line. But when such portion is a suburban or interurban electric railway, abandonment may be authorized only if it is part of a general steam railroad system of. transportation. *693§ 1 (18) and (22) of the Interstate Commerce Act, as amended, 49 U. S. C. § 1 (18) and (22). This Court has held that whether such a line is of a character to permit abandonment under federal authority need not be determined in the first instance by the Interstate Commerce Commission; and such determination when made does not foreclose an independent judicial judgment. Texas & Pacific Ry. Co. v. Gulf, C. & S. F. Ry. Co., 270 U. S. 266, and United States v. Idaho, 298 U. S. 105. On such an independent examination of the issue the court below had no doubt that the Yonkers branch of the New York Central, the portion of the Central lines for which abandonment was here sought, was not “a suburban or interurban line unconnected with the rest of the Central’s railroad system” but was in fact “intertwined with the operation of the [New York Central Railroad] system as a whole.” 50 F. Supp. 497, 498. The record amply sustains this conclusion. If this Court, however, on its own estimate of the various elements in the financial, physical and transportation relations between the rest of the New York Central lines and this Yonkers branch, had struck a contrary balance and found that the Yonkers branch was not operated as a part of the general New York Central system, I should not have deemed the matter of sufficient importance to warrant expression of dissent.
But the Court does not decide on the merits. In effect, it remits the controversy to the Interstate Commerce Commission on the ground that the Commission did not make a formal finding, described as “jurisdictional,” that the Yonkers branch was in fact “operated as a part . . . of a general steam railroad system of transportation.” The Commission may very well now formally make such a finding of a connection between the Yonkers branch and the New York Central, which in fact is writ large in the Commission’s report in granting the application for abandonment, and the weary round of litigation may be re*694peated to the futile end of having this Court then, forsooth, express an opinion on the merits opposed to that of the Commission and the District Court. This danger if not likelihood of thus marching the king’s men up the hill and then marching them down again seems to me a mode of judicial administration to which I cannot yield concurrence. I think the case should be disposed of on the mérits by affirming the. judgment of the District Court.
. This seems to me all the more called for since I find no defect in the foundation of the Commission’s order. No doubt the Interstate Commerce Commission like other administrative agencies should keep within legal bounds and courts should keep them there, in so far as Congress has entrusted them with judicial review over administrative acts. Of course when a statute makes indispensable “an express finding,” an express finding is imperative, see Wichita Railroad & Light Co. v. Public Utilities Comm’n, 260 U. S. 48, 59. But-'.the history of the Interstate Commerce Act and its amendments illumine the different legal functions expressed . by . the term findings. When Congress exacts-from the Commission formal findings there is'an end to the'mátter.. For certain duties of the Commission and at certain stages in the history of the Interstate Commerce Act, Congress did require formal findings, but experience led Congress later to dispense with, such formal requirements. See Manufacturers Ry. Co. v. United States, 246 U. S. 457, 489-90. But courts have also spoken of the need of findings as the basis of validity of an order by the Interstate Commerce Commission in the absence of a Congressional direction for findings: The requirement of findings in such a context is merely part of the need for courts to know what it is that the Commission has really determined in order that they may know what to review. ; “We must know what a decision means before the duty becomes ours to say whether it is right or *695wrong.” See United States v. Chicago, M., St. P. & P. R. Co., 294 U. S. 499, 509-511.
This is the real ground for the decisions which have found Interstate Commerce Commission orders wanting in necessary findings. They have all been cases where the determination of an issue is not open to independent judgment by this Court, and where the case as it came here rested on conflicting inferences of fact left unresolved by the Commission. Such were the circumstances, for instance, in Florida v. United States, 282 U. S. 194, particularly at 214-215, and United States v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 293 U. S. 454, 455, particularly at 463-464. Findings in this sense is a way of describing the duty of the Commission to decide issues actually in controversy before it. Analysis is not furthered by speaking of such findings as “jurisdictional” and not even when — to adapt a famous phrase — jurisdictional is softened by a quasi. “Jurisdiction” competes with “right” as one of the most deceptive of legal pitfalls. The opinions in Crowell v. Benson, 285 U. S. 22, and the casuistries to which they have given rise bear unedifying testimony of the morass into which one is led in working out problems of judicial review over administrative decisions by loose talk about jurisdiction.
The nub of the matter regarding the requirement of findings, where the formal making of them is not legislatively commanded, is indicated in United States v. Louisiana, 290 U. S. 70. Reviewing the validity of the Commission’s order is the serious business of sitting in judgment upon a tribunal of great traditions and large responsibility. An order of the Commission should not be viewed in a hypercritical spirit nor even as though elegan-tia juris were our concern. We should judge a challenged order of the Commission by “the report, read as a whole,” 290 U. S. supra at 80, and by the record as a whole out of which the report arose.
*696Viewing its order in this light makes plain enough why the Commission never formally stated that the line which it authorized to be abandoned was in fact operated as part of the New York Central system. It never formally made this statement because it was never questioned before it. On the face of the application, in the report proposed by the Commissioner’s examiner, and in the report of the Commission, by Division 4, authorizing the issuance of a certificate of abandonment, the facts showing that the Yonkers branch was a part of the operating system of the New York Central are set forth in detail. Extensive exceptions were taken to the examiner’s report by the City of Yonkers and a committee of Yonkers commuters but not even remotely did they take the point which is now made the ground for invalidating the Commission’s order. Elaborate petitions for rehearing were filed by the protestants, including the Public Service Commission of New York, as the guardian of the local interests of New York,1 but not one of these petitions raised the objection now raised. The jurisdiction of the Commission was questioned, but no claim was made that the Yonkers branch was not an operating part of the New York Central. The City of Yonkers enumerated four grounds in challenging *697the jurisdiction of the Commission, but it did not specify the one now taken by the Court. The committee of commuters rested their claim of want of jurisdiction on the specific grounds that "(1) the line sought to be abandoned is an interurban electric passenger railway located wholly within the State of New York and (2) . . . the alleged anmia.1 operating deficit” of the Yonkers branch was too insignificant to burden the operation of the New York Central. Exercising the discretion which Congress explicitly conferred upon it, the full Commission denied the petition for rehearing. Interstate Commerce Act, § 17 (6). In any fair construction of the action of the Commission such a denial is an adverse finding of such claims as were made in the petitions for rehearing. The crucial fact is that only when the present bill was filed in the court below did the objection which the Court now sustains emerge in the specific claim that the Yonkers “branch is not operated as a part or parts of a general steam railroad system of transportation.”
Can there be any doubt that this contention was not put to the Commission because it was an afterthought? This issue was never tendered to the Commission because the facts which deny it were never questioned in the proceedings conducted before it with vigor and ability by several protestants during the three successive stages that preceded a challenge in the courts.
The case is now sent back to the Commission. The facts regarding the relation of the Yonkers branch to the New York Central are spread at large upon the record and are not in controversy. In view of the three proceedings before the Commission it is reasonable to assume that the Commission will add to its report the formal finding now requested of it. If the case then returns here I find it too hard to believe that this Court would reject the conclusion of the Commission and of the lower court that the Yonkers branch is an operating part of the New York Central *698within § 1 (22). Is not insistence on such an empty formalism a reversion to seventeenth century pleading which required talismanic phrases, as for instance that a seller could not be held to warrant that he sold what he purported to sell unless the buyer pleaded warrantizando ven-didit or barganizasset? On the other hand, if the Court with all the facts before it does not think the Yonkers branch is a part of the railway operations of the New York Central, now is the time to say so.
Mr. Justice Reed and Mr. Justice Jackson join in this opinion.

 Due concern for local interests in the administration of the Interstate Commerce Act hardly calls for an exaggerated concern for formal findings. The Interstate Commerce Act relies primarily on state authorities for the safeguarding of local interests. It is therefore relevant to note that the New York Public Service Commission, which is charged with the duty of protecting the local interests of New York against federal encroachments and which does not appear to have been unalert in doing so, has acquiesced in the decision below and is not here urging the local interest on which the decision of this Court seems to be based. That the state agency had best be looked to for the vindication of conflicting local interests within a state is well illustrated by the fact that while the City of Yonkers protested against the abandonment of the branch line, the City of New York urged it.