Does the Jurisdiction of the California Railroad Commission Extend to Air Transportation

Abstract

IN THE period following 1870 the Granger Movement influenced many states to pass laws prohibiting unreasonable railroad rates, discriminations and practices.' Commissions were created to administer and enforce these statutes against the railroads. One of these was the California Railroad Commission.' There does not appear to be anything else in the genesis of this Commission in 1879 which would warrant broadening its original compass beyond the specific need that produced it. The language of the constitutional and statutory provisions creating and implementing the Commission was functionally contrived. It set up a special kind of agency to regulate in a limited way a transportation medium that was then causing the people concern. Controlled regulatory growth was later specifically provided for by endowing the legislature with authority to enlarge the Commission's powers and orbit as it saw fit. Nowhere in its origins (at a time when the entire country was at the threshold of a new and mighty transportation era) does it appear that the Commission was given a blank check on the future. Being unknown to the common law, a public utility commission is conditioned by the terms of its creating statute, organic or legislative.3 These conditions mark the boundaries of its authority which