United States v. Pierce Auto Freight Lines/Opinion of the Court

The validity of an order of the Interstate Commerce Commission is in question. The order granted to appellants, Consolidated Freightways, Inc., and Oregon-Nevada-California Fast Freight, Inc., certificates of public convenience and necessity authorizing extensions of their operations as motor carriers. Appellees, competing carriers, some of whom are railway affiliated, were protestants in the proceedings before the Commission. They successfully attacked the order in a specially constituted District Court, on grounds questioning the sufficiency of the findings and the evidence, as well as the propriety and fairness of the Commission's procedure. The District Court's decree, 57 F.Supp. 192, 'suspended' the order and remanded the cause to the Commission for rehearing although a stay pending appeal was denied.

The shortened statement of the major thing in controversy is whether the appellants, Consolidated and O.N.C., properly were allowed by the Commission to substitute wholly independent and competing through services between Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, for the service which they jointly rendered between those cities, prior to the filing of these applications, by interchanging freight at intermediate points. The protesting appellees were carriers competing with the joint service of Consolidated and O.N.C. and will be competitors of each, as those companies will be with each other, if the Commission's order is sustained. This fact is the source of the controversy and is important to bear in mind for full understanding of the detailed facts and issues as well as of what is ultimately at stake. Although each appellant originally sought exclusive authority to conduct the proposed through operation in substitution for the former joint service, and thus opposed the other's application, both now seek to sustain the Commission's order, as of course does the Commission itself.

At the time of Consolidated's application in December, 1939, it operated various routes in the Northwest, some extending eastward from the Portland and Seattle areas, in addition to the joint service by in erchange with O.N.C. southward from Portland to San Francisco. Two of these routes, comprising part of the latter service, extended from Portland southerly to Medford and Klamath Falls, both of which lie just north of the Oregon-California boundary and were points of interchange with O.N.C. In so far as it is now pertinent, Consolidated's application sought permission to extend its operations from Medford and Klamath Falls southward to San Francisco, in other words, over the portion of the route previously used in the joint service for O.N.C.'s operations.

Conversely, at the time of O.N.C.'s application in January, 1940, it was operating from San Francisco to Medford and Klamath Falls. It sought to extend its operations from Medford to Portland and, as an alternative slightly longer route, from Klamath Falls to Portland through Goshen, Oregon.

Thus, in effect, Consolidated and O.N.C. each sought to conduct operations independently throughout the entire distance between Portland and San Francisco. The occasion for the separate applications was O.N.C.'s refusal to join an association of connecting carriers which Consolidated was sponsoring.

The applications were heard separately, as the statute requires, before different joint boards. However, because they were so closely related in their common features, the hearings were held at the same places and one application was heard immediately after the other. Each applicant intervened in the proceeding on the other's application, and various parties, including the appellees, appeared in opposition in both proceedings. The parties stipulated that much of the evidence presented in the O.N.C. hearing should be introduced by reference into the Consolidated record. This included all of the appellees' affirmative evidence in opposition to the two applications. The hearings thus were substantially coordinated, though not technically consolidated, for the common features of the applications.

As neither joint board could agree upon the recommendations to be made, both matters were referred to an examiner. In separate reports he recommended the denial of both applications. Division 5, with one commissioner dissenting, dealt with both in a single report. It reversed the examiner in both cases and ordered that each application be granted. Appellees' petition for rehearing was denied. They thereupon brought this suit in the District Court.

The findings of fact and the court's opinion, 57 F.Supp. 192, disclose that it held the Commission's order invalid on several grounds. One was that 'the Commission considered the separate records as though the case was a consolidated one. Evidence which appeared only in one record was used by the Commission to support general findings in the Report concerning both Consolidated and O.N.C. In each proceeding embraced within the Report and the Commission's order, evidence not offered or received in such proceeding and not a part of the record therein was drawn upon and considered by the Commission.' The court also found that there was no evidence in either record to support the Commission's finding that 'the present and future public convenience and necessity require both the operations' by Consolidated and those by O.N.C. (Emphasis added.) And it further found that at no time in the proceeding had there been notice to the parties, the witnesses, or t e general public that both applications might be granted; that indeed 'the whole basis of the original proceeding before the Joint Boards was the question of whether any through-line operation between San Francisco and Portland should be allowed and, if so, which one of the two separate applications'; and that 'no opportunity was given to plaintiffs to maintain their rights or to present appropriate protests and deferses to the institution of two competing through-line operations between San Francisco and Portland.' (Emphasis added.) Finally the court held that in granting both applications the Commission had not considered the public interest and suggested that its denial of the petition for rehearing was improper.

For all these supposed errors the District Court suspended the Commission's order and remanded the cause 'for rehearing.' In doing so it said: 'This action will be taken in order that all parties may be placed on notice as to what type hearing will be held, whether joint or several, and in order that appropriate findings be made as to the public convenience and necessity which requires the authorization of two new through-lines in competition with each other and in competition with the other facilities, and also as to the ability of Consolidated to initiate and maintain one of such lines in view of present conditions.' (Emphasis added) 57 F.Supp. at page 198.

Obviously the court's objection was not to the manner in which the proceedings were conducted prior to the time when the hearings ended and the Commission took the cases under consideration. Up to this point no fault is found with what was done. The difficulty lay altogether, in the court's view, with the way in which it thought the Commission had considered the cases and reached its conclusions. And this arose entirely from the fact that the Commission disposed of them in a single report, rather than in separate ones for each case; and from the further fact that it concluded that both applications should be granted rather than that both should be denied or one denied and one granted.

We are not informed, of course, whether the court would have reached the same result if the Commission had written separate reports in each case, arriving at the same conclusions, although it seems suggested that any of the other possible results would have been impeccable, whether stated in separate reports or a single one. Obviously it was no sufficient ground for suspending the Commission's order that it chose to write one report rather than two, especially in matters as closely related as these, if the single report together with the findings and the evidence was sufficient to sustain the action taken in each case. It is not uncommon judicial practice to follow this course.

Nor, with those conditions satisfied, could the mere fact that the Commission concluded to grant rather than to deny both applications, or to grant one and deny the other, invalidate its judgment. For each application when it was filed sought to conduct the extended operation which it specified; nothing in either foreclosed the possibility that both might be granted, although for obvious reasons each applicant pposed the granting of the other's extension; and from the beginning it was as much a possible outcome that both applications would be granted as that both would be denied or one be granted and one denied. If therefore the Commission had written separate reports in each case, reaching the same result, it would have been squarely within the issues and within the outcomes comprehended from the beginning; and the only questions for judicial consideration, absent some procedural deviation not now presented, would have been the sufficiency of the findings and the evidence to sustain its action in each case. We think those are the upon questions of any substance arising upon this appeal.

The District Court, however, regarded the Commission's failure to write separate reports as indicating that it did not consider each case separately and exclusively on its own record, but looked to the evidence in both in forming its judgment. This 'approach' the court thought wrong, not only as showing that the Commission considered evidence in each case which it had no right to take into account, but also as injecting a new and important issue in both proceedings not previously regarded by the parties as comprehended within the applications and the hearings. The 'new issue' thought to be thus injected was the possibility that both applications might be granted. From this basic idea other errors were pyramided, among them that the protesting appellees had been given no notice of the kind of proceeding which would be held and had been deprived of any opportunity to present proper protests and evidence relating to the allegedly newly injected issue.

The case has taken longer to state than the merits should require for its disposition. Appellees plant themselves here squarely on the District Court's objections to the Commission's 'approach' and procedure. Two principal questions thus are presented: (1) Was evidence improperly considered by the Commission, so as to require reversal of its order; and (2) were new issues injected by its action in disposing of the cases with a single report? Other issues more or less related may be shortly disposed of.

We put to one side, in the first place, the idea that the Commission, by the manner in which it disposed of the causes, injected as a 'new issue' the question whether both applications might be granted and with it the correlative notions that the appellees had no notice that this issue would be involved and no opportunity to make appropriate protests or to present evidence upon it. In a strict view neither the appellees nor the court were entitled to raise these questions. For it was not at any time suggested to the Commission, as it might have been upon petition for rehearing, that the proceedings had been conducted on the theory that both applications would not be granted. Appellees stated in their petition for rehearing only that 'Division 5 has erroneously and improperly assumed that in granting one of the applications it is by force of necessity required to grant the other. * *  * ' This is very different from suggesting that the Commission has not entitled at all to consider gran ing both applications. It is highly questionable therefore whether the appellees have not waived this question. But the District Court, in raising it, has said that it was acting in protection of the public interest and we pass therefore to consideration of the issue on its merits.

The Commission did not, by the manner in which it disposed of the cause, inject as a 'new issue' the question whether both applications might be granted. If the appellees actually assumed in the beginning that both applications could not be granted, their assumption was in the teeth of the applications and the permissible outcomes presented for the Commission's decision.

As has been said, the two applications were separately instituted and heard. In the natural course of events each joint board was to decide whether to grant or to deny the particular application before it. The possibilities therefore were that both applications might be denied, that one might be granted and the other denied, or that both might be granted. Moreover, the record contains evidence showing that the possibility of granting both applications was in the minds of counsel and witnesses. And this possibility must have been apparent from the beginning, not only from the history of the prior operations and the primary cause for their impending disruption, but also from the obvious relations of the applications to each other, the equally obvious consequences to the applicants of granting one and denying the other, and the Commission's recognition of these facts by the manner in which it scheduled the hearings for substantially concurrent treatment. The parties too apparently gave similar recognition to the questioned possible outcome by their stipulation for the use of evidence in both proceedings.

The issue concerning whether both applications should be granted was injected, not by the Commission's report or any other action taken by it, but by the filing of the applications in the first place. If appellees misconceived the ature of the proceedings in this respect, as we do not think was the case, they were not misled into doing so by any action of the Commission or the other appellants.

We turn therefore to the objections made on the score of the Commission's findings and its treatment of the evidence. In our opinion they are equally untenable. The principal cause of complaint in these respects is that the Commission did not consider each case exclusively on its own record but looked to the evidence in both proceedings in forming its judgment. If this is true and if it has resulted in substantial prejudice to the appellees, as might occur, for example, if the Commission were shown prejudicially to have considered evidence bearing on one case which did not affect it and was presented in the other, and which appellees were given no opportunity to meet, the orders, or one of them, would be improperly grounded.

But no showing of this sort has been made. It is to be recalled that all of the appellees, as well as both of the applicants, were parties to both proceedings; were represented at all of the hearings, which were conducted at substantially the same times and places; and were given full opportunity to present all evidence they considered pertinent, to cross-examine witnesses and otherwise to protect their interests. Moreover, large portions of the evidence applied as much to one application as to another. This was true, for example, of the proofs relating to traffic conditions, shipper demands, the need for faster service and mechanical refrigeration, and other items. In these circumstances it is difficult to see how appellees could have sustained substantial prejudice from the Commission's consideration of the evidence upon matters as closely related as those in issue in these two proceedings.

Nor indeed do they succeed in showing such prejudice. As we understand them, the most that they assert is that the Commission's report so commingles the two cases that it is impossible to determine which statements are supported by which record. But neither in the briefs, nor upon specific inquiry at the argument, were they able to point to any particular instance of prejudice. Nor in fact does the opinion of the District Court, although it asserts that the report is filled with numerous instances of this sort. The assertion, we think, is colored by the court's erroneous idea that the report first injected the question whether both applications should be granted; and to the same cause, it would seem, may be attributed the court's undue discounting of the fact that upon this issue, as on the alternative possible outcomes, much of the evidence was identical, made so by the parties' own stipulation. In any event the appellees have not pointed to any specific statement in the report which is obviously applicable to both cases or which is required as a basic finding to support the order in one, which is without support in both records or in the one which is appropriate.

In the absence of any showing of specific prejudice, the claim comes down to the highly technical objection that the Commission, in the final stage of forming its judgment, could not in either case take account of what had been done in the other, notwithstanding the closely related character and objects of the applications and the prior proceedings. The contention in its farthest reach amounts to a legal version of the scriptural injunction against letting one's right hand know what one's left hand may be doing.

Obviously it would be consistent neither with good sense nor, we think, with the type of hearing assured by the statute to force the Commission to put on such complete blinders. Whatever may be the limits outside which it cannot go in looking beyond the record in the particular proceeding at the stage of formulating its judgment, none certainly would go so far. And, given that the report contains all the essential findings required, cf. State of Florida v. United States, 282 U.S. 194, 51 S.C. 119, 75 L.Ed. 291, the Commission is not compelled to annotate to each finding the evidence supporting it.

It is true that ordinarily an administrative agency will act appropriately, in a proceeding of this sort, upon the record presented and such matters as properly may receive its attention through 'official notice.' It is also true that this Court, in appropriate instances, has limited the use of the latter implement in order to assure that the parties will not be deprived of a fair hearing. See United States v. Abilene & S.R. Co., 265 U.S. 274, 286-290, 44 S.Ct. 565, 568-570, 68 L.Ed. 1016; Interstate Commerce Commission v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co., 227 U.S. 88, 93, 94, 33 S.Ct. 185, 187, 188, 57 L.Ed. 431. But in doing so it has not undertaken to make a fetish of sticking squarely within the four corners of the specific record in administrative proceedings or of pinning down such agencies, with reference to fact determinations, even more rigidly than the courts in strictly judicial proceedings. On the contrary, in the one case as in the other, the mere fact that the determining body has looked beyond the record proper does not invalidate its action unless substantial prejudice is shown to result. Market St. Ry. Co. v. Railroad Comm., 324 U.S. 548, 561, 562, 65 S.Ct. 770, 777, 778; cf. Opp Cotton Mills v. Administrator, 312 U.S. 126, 154, 155, 657, 61 S.Ct. 524, 536, 537, 85 L.Ed. 624. In these cases no more is necessary than to apply that rule.

The remaining objections are directed more appropriately to the findings and their support in the evidence. Appellees say that the order granting both applications is defective in that it is not founded upon an express finding or indeed upon any finding that there was a need for two through-line operations which would be in competition with one another. They urge that it was not sufficient for the Commission to find, as it did on adequate evidence, that the existing service between Portland and San Francisco was inadequate; and to conclude, as the report expressly stated, that in view of this fact, among others, 'public convenience and necessity require the operations set forth in our findings herein.' This statement was additional to the explicit conclusion already noted that the situation presented by the applications was one which required either granting both or denying both. And the findings expressly stated, concerning each application, that the 'present and future public convenience and necessity require the extended operations.'

Apart from the fact that this was all that the statute required, cf. United States v. Detroit & Cleveland Nevigation Co., 326 U.S. 236, 66 S.Ct. 75, and the further fact that there can be no presumption that the Commission disregarded the public or any other interest, there are two obvious answers. One is that the Commission, in making the separately stated findings, could not have been oblivious to the competitive consequences of its order or the relation of those consequences to the public interest. The other is that those findings, read in the light of the report, adequately and expressly cover the element of public convenience and necessity, including the competitive factors which the Commission inescapably had in mind. Only the most hypercritical reading of the findings, and one which ignores the report's explicit statements in many respects, could construe them as meaning only that each operation was required by public convenience and necessity without any regard to the competitive consequences of granting both. The Commission should not be required to rewrite its report simply to say, redundantly we think, that both operations, as well as each, are required by public convenience and necessity.

Appellees further say that, even if the Commission was correct in granting a certificate of public convenience and necessity to O.N.C., it improperly granted such a certificate to Consolidated. Section 207(a), 49 U.S.C.A. § 307(a), requires that the Commission find 'that the applicant is fit, willing, and able properly to perform the service proposed' and the District Court made a finding of fact that 'the Commission failed to find, and there is no evidence in the record to support such a finding, that Consolidated is adequately equipped under any conditions.' The court undoubtedly did not mean that there was no finding whatever as to fitness, willingness and ability, for the Commission did make such a finding in the statutory language. What was obviously meant was that such an ultimate finding was not enough, as of course it was not, see State of Florida v. United States, supra, in the absence of a basic finding to support it; and that there was no such basic finding.

We do not agree, however, that there was no such basic finding. The paragraph of the Commission's report set out in the margin was a sufficient finding, though inartistically drawn, concerning Consolidated's financial fitness and ability. Nor was there a lack of evidence to support this.

Finally, the District Court remanded the cases for rehearing in order for the Commission, among other things, to determine Consolidated's fitness 'to initiate and maintain one of such lines in view of present conditions.' This action was unwarranted. The records in the two proceedings were closed in October, 1940. The Commission issued its report and order on March 1, 1943. A petition for rehearing was filed by the appellees and other protestants on April 30, 1943, and was denied by the Commission on August 2, 1943. The certificates were issued on September 7 and 15, 1943. Suit was brought in the District Court on January 13, 1944. The court rendered its decision on September 20, 1944, suggesting that the Commission had improperly denied the petition for rehearing. Its view was that the record was so stale, particularly in view of the influence of the war upon transportation facilities, that application of the doctrine of Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe R. Co. v. United States, 284 U.S. 248, 52 S.Ct. 146, 76 L.Ed. 273, was proper.

That case, as has been indicated more than once, was 'promptly restricted * *  * to its special facts, United States v. Northern Pac. R. Co., 288 U.S. 490, 53 S.Ct. 406, 77 L.Ed. 914, and it stands virtually alone.' Interstate Commerce Commission v. Jersey City, 322 U.S. 503, 515, 64 S.Ct. 1129, 1135, 88 L.Ed. 1420; see also Baltimore & Ohio R. Co. v. United States, 298 U.S. 349, 389, 56 S.Ct. 797, 817, 80 L.Ed. 1209. Except in the single instance, it has been held consistently that rehearings before administrative bodies are addressed to their own discretion. Interstate Commerce Commission v. Jersey City, supra. Only a showing of the clearest abuse of discretion could sustain an exception to that rule. The Commission was well acquainted with the impact of the war upon facilit es for transport and upon the transportation business in general. In addition to its own expert knowledge concerning such matters, it had before it not only the facts set forth in the petition for rehearing but also those alleged in the extended replies filed by the applicants.

We think the court misconceived not only the effects of the Commission's action in these cases but also its own function. It is not true, as the opinion stated, that ' * *  * the courts must in a litigated case, be the arbiters of the paramount public interest.' This is rather the business of the Commission, made such by the very terms of the statute. The function of the reviewing court is much more restricted. It is limited to ascertaining whether there is warrant in the law and the facts for what the Commission has done. Unless in some specific respect there has been prejudicial departure from requirements of the law or abuse of the Commission's discretion, the reviewing court is without authority to intervene. It cannot substitute its own view concerning what should be done, whether with reference to competitive considerations or others, for the Commission's judgment upon matters committed to its determination, if that has support in the record and the applicable law.

The judgment is reversed.

Reversed.

Mr. Justice DOUGLAS dissents.

Mr. Justice JACKSON took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.