Louisville Nashville Railroad Company v. F. W. Cook Brewing Company/Opinion of the Court

United States Supreme Court

223 U.S. 70

Louisville Nashville Railroad Company  v.  F. W. Cook Brewing Company

 Argued: November 13, 1911. --- Decided: January 22, 1912

1. The jurisdiction of this court to entertain an appeal in this case cannot be seriously controverted. The jurisdiction of the circuit court was not dependent alone upon diversity of citizenship. There was involved not only the validity of the law of Kentucky as a regulation of interstate commerce, but a question as to whether the sole remedy in any such case was not by an application to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

2. The objection that there was an adequate remedy at law, assuming that the subject is one for any tribunal other than the Interstate Commerce Commission, comes too late, if ever available, the objection being now made for the first time, so far as is discoverable from the record. The announced purpose of the railroad company to abjure its function and duty as a common carrier in respect of interstate shipments of all intoxicating liquors to localities in the state of Kentucky where the Kentucky local-option prohibition laws prevailed threatened the ruin of complainant's business, and relief by injunction against such a continued course of conduct was certainly one which in such circumstances might be granted. Where the case is one in which, under any circumstances, relief in equity may be admissible, it is too late to say that there was an adequate remedy at law only upon review proceedings. Kilbourn v. Sunderland, 130 U.S. 505, 32 L. ed. 1005, 9 Sup. Ct. Rep. 594.

3. The case was heard upon bill and answer. The defense is based solely upon the terms of the Kentucky act of March 21, 1906, now § 2569a, Carroll's Kentucky Statutes of 1909, entitled an act 'to Regulate the Carrying, Moving, Delivery, Transferring or Distribution of Intoxicating Liquors in Local-option Districts.' By that act it is made unlawful for any common carrier to transport beer or any intoxicating liquor to any consignee in any locality within the state where the sale of such liquors has been prohibited by vote of the people under the local-option law of the state. A violation of the law subjects the offender to a fine of not less than fifty nor more than one hundred dollars for each offense.

Upon the assumption that this legislation effectively prohibited both state and interstate transportation of such commodities within the state, the railroad company notified all of its agents, in and out of the state, to refuse to receive such liquors when consigned to any local-option point. This notification was by a printed circular letter, which set out the full text of the act, and gave a full list of all such local-option points. In express terms this notification applied to both inter and intrastate shipments; and, it is averred, this circular was filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission. It is not, however, averred that the Commission either took any action thereon, or that it was asked to take any action.

The legality of the attitude of the railroad company toward interstate shipments of intoxicating liquors to local-option points in Kentucky must turn upon the validity of that legislation as applied to interstate shipments.

By a long line of decisions, beginning even prior to Leisy v. Hardin, 135 U.S. 100, 34 L. ed. 128, 3 Inters. Com. Rep. 36, 10 Sup. Ct. Rep. 681, it has been indisputably determined:

a. That beer and other intoxicating liquors are a recognized and legitimate subject of interstate commerce;

b. That it is not competent for any state to forbid any common carrier to transport such articles from a consignor in one state to a consignee in another;

c. That until such transportation is concluded by delivery to the consignee, such commodities do not become subject to state regulation, restraining their sale or disposition.

The Wilson act (26 Stat. at L. 313, chap. 728, U.S.C.omp. Stat. 1901, p. 3177), which subjects such liquors to state regulation, although still in the original packages, does not apply before actual delivery to such consignee, where the shipment is interstate. Some of the many later cases in which these matters have been so determined and the Wilson act construed are: Rhodes v. Iowa, 170 U.S. 412, 42 L. ed. 1088, 18 Sup. Ct. Rep. 664; Vance v. W. A. Vandercook Co. 170 U.S. 438, 42 L. ed. 1100, 18 Sup. Ct. Rep. 674; Heyman v. Southern R. Co. 203 U.S. 270, 51 L. ed. 178, 27 Sup. Ct. Rep. 104, 7 A. & E. Ann. Cas. 1130; Adams Exp. Co. v. Kentucky, 214 U.S. 218, 53 L. ed. 972, 29 Sup. Ct. Rep. 633.

Valid as the Kentucky legislation undoubtedly was as a regulation in respect to intrastate shipments of such articles, it was most obviously never an effective enactment in so far as it undertook to regulate interstate shipments to dry points. Pending this very litigation, the Kentucky court of appeals, upon the authority of the line of cases above cited, reached the same conclusion. Cincinnati, N. O. & T. P. R. Co. v. Com. 126 Ky. 563, 104 S. W. 394.

The obligation of the railroad company to conform to the requirements of the Kentucky law, so far as that law prohibited intrastate shipments, is clear, and to this extent its circular notification was commendable. But the duty of this company, as an interstate common carrier for hire, to receive for transportation to consignees upon its line in Kentucky from consignors in other states, any commodity which is an ordinary subject of interstate commerce and such transportation, could not be prohibited by any law of the state of such consignee, inasmuch as any such law would be an unlawful regulation of interstate commerce, not authorized by the police power of the state. It is obvious, therefore, that in so far as the Kentucky statute was an illegal regulation of interstate commerce, it neither imposed an obligation to obey, nor affords an excuse for refusal to perform the general duty of the railroad company as a common carrier of freight.

The fact that the circular notice of the company referred to was filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission is incidentally stated in the answer of the company, and this fact is now made the basis for an argument that neither the state court nor the circuit court had any jurisdiction, and that an application should have been made to the Interstate Commerce Commission for an order requiring the railroad company to desist from refusing to transport such articles in interstate commerce.

Why should the brewing company have made complaint to the Commission? What relief could it afford? There was no tariff question. There was no discrimination against shipments tendered by complainant and like shipments tendered by other brewers to the same points. There was no claim that the commodities tendered were inherently dangerous to transport, or that the railroad company did not have transportation facilities. Evansville was not discriminated against in favor of like shipments to the same points. To say that there was a discrimination between shipments of intoxicants and other commodities does not make a case of discrimination or preference where the denial of such shipments is based, as is the case here, wholly and solely upon an illegal restraint upon that kind of interstate commerce, is to reason in a circle, for the question comes back at last to the validity of the law forbidding such shipments. There was no discrimination if the law was valid, and the result must turn not upon any administrative question or questions of fact within the scope of the power of the Commission, but upon the validity of the legislation which controlled the action of the carrier. That is a question of general law, for a judicial tribunal, and one not competent for the Commission as a purely administrative body.

The decision in the case of Texas & P. R. Co. v. Abilene Cotton Oil Co. 204 U.S. 426, 51 L. ed. 553, 27 Sup. Ct. Rep. 350, 9 A. & E. Ann. Cas. 1075, is not applicable here. The question there was one of the reasonableness of a rate. Such a question is primarily one of administrative character, and the propriety of a prior resort to the Commission to obtain a ruling upon the question of reasonableness involved the very heart of the whole statute. That there might be uniformity in rate-making necessarily required a resort to that body as a basis for a common-law recovery of an excessive charge.

The result is that the decree of the court below must be affirmed.

Notes