Trs. of Village of Saratoga Springs v. Saratoga Gas, Elec. Light & Power Co.

• Decision Date: 18 February 1908
• Citation: 191 N.Y. 123,83 N.E. 693
• Parties: TRUSTEES OF VILLAGE OF SARATOGA SPRINGS v. SARATOGA GAS, ELECTRIC LIGHT & POWER CO.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

191 N.Y. 123

83 N.E. 693

TRUSTEES OF VILLAGE OF SARATOGA SPRINGS

v.SARATOGA GAS, ELECTRIC LIGHT & POWER CO.

Court of Appeals of New York.

Feb. 18, 1908.

Appeal from Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department.

Proceedings by the trustees of the village of Saratoga Springs to require the commission of gas and electricity to fix the price to be charged by the Saratoga Gas, Electric Light & Power Company for gas and electricity. From a determination of the commission fixing the maximum charge affirmed by the Appellate Division (107 N. Y. Supp. 341), the gas and electric light company appeals. Reversed. Order vacated.Edgar T. Brackett, John H. Stanchfield, and James M. Beck, for appellant.

George P. Decker, Deputy Atty. Gen., Marcus T. Hun, Edward B. Whitney, David B. Hill, and Wm. A. Sutherland, for respondents.

CULLEN, C. J.

This appeal presents the question of the constitutionality of the statute passed by the Legislature in 1905 (p. 2092, c. 737), providing for the appointment by the Governor of a commission, which was authorized to determine, upon the complaint of municipal authority or consumers, the maximum price to be charged for service by gas and electric light companies. This statute confers many other powers upon the commission. This appeal, however, presents only the question of the validity of the statute in so far as it confers upon the commission the power to fix maximum rates. The provisions of the statute in this respect are easily separable from the remainder of the act, and, therefore, it is the validity of such provisions alone that we shall consider on this appeal.

The argument by the learned counsel for the appellant in their attack upon the statute has taken a very broad range. While they concede that the fixing of maximum rates of carriers and public service corporations is a proper exercise of the police power of the state, provided, of course, that the rates so fixed are not confiscatory and in violation of property rights, it is contended that the power is strictly legislative, and that the act before us is unconstitutional, in that it assumes to delegate to the commission, an administrative body, legislative powers. The argument has been carried so far as to suggest that the blending of legislative and executive or adminstrative powers in the same officers might be a violation of the federal Constitution guaranteeing to every state a republican form of government. While it is a mere suggestion, it should not pass unnoticed, and a brief reference to history is sufficient to dispose of it. At the time the state of New York ratified the federal Constitution its inhabitants were living under a Constitution by which the court of last resort, called the ‘Court for the Correction of Errors,’ was composed of 24 (afterwards 32) members of the Senate (the upper house of the Legislature), the chancellor, and the three judges of the Supreme Court, while the appointment of every officer in the executive government of the state, including local officers, with the exception of a few named in the Constitution, was vested in the council of appointment, composed of one senator from each of the four senatorial districts into which the state was divided. The council of appointment continued until 1821, when it was abolished by the new Constitution of that year; but the Court of Errors remained the court of last resort until the Constitution of 1846. It would have surprised the citizens of the state had it been suggested to them during the first half of the last century that they were not living under a republican form of government. They would not have been shocked, because no one would have taken the suggestion seriously. Indeed, Justice Story, in his work on the Constitution, referring to the distribution of the three great powers of government-legislative, executive, and judicial-says: ‘But when we speak of the separation of the three great powers of government, and maintain that that separation is indispensable to public liberty, we are to understand this maxim in a limited sense. It is not meant to affirm that they must be kept wholly and entirely separate and distinct, and have no common link of connection or dependence, the one upon the other, in the slightest degree. The true meaning is that the whole power of one of these departments should not be exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of either of the other departments, and that such exercise of the whole power would subvert the principles of a free Constitution. * * * The slightest examination of the British Constitution will at once convince us that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments are by no means totally distinct and separate from each other.’ See, also, opinion of Harlan, J., in Dreyer v. Illinois, 187 U. S. 71, 23 Sup. Ct. 28, 47 L. Ed. 79. It is not necessary to pursue the matter further, because of the recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States on rate commission statutes, which, while as properly urged by counsel for the appellant, they do not pass upon the question of the conflict between such statutes and the Constitutions of the states in which they were enacted, do necessarily determine that the enactment of such statutes does not violate the federal Constitution. Stone v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., 116 U. S. 307, 6 Sup. Ct. 334, 388, 1191,29 L. Ed. 636;Reagan v. Same, 154 U. S. 362, 14 Sup. Ct. 1047, 38 L. Ed. 1014;Minneapolis & St. Louis R. R. Co. v. Minnesota, 186 U. S. 257, 22 Sup. Ct. 900, 46 L. Ed. 1151;Atlantic Coast Line v. Florida, 203 U. S. 256, 27 Sup. Ct. 108, 51 L. Ed. 174;Atlantic Coast Line v. N. C. Commission, 206 U. S. 1, 27 Sup. Ct. 585, 51 L. Ed. 933. In the last case cited Mr. Justice White said: ‘The elementary proposition that railroads, from the public nature of the business by them carried on and the interest which the public have in their operation, are subject, as to their state business, to state requlation, which may be exerted either directly by the legislative authority, or by administrative bodies endowed with power to that end, is not and could not be successfully questioned in view of the long line of authorities sustaining that doctrine.’ Therefore, the only question before us is whether the statute is in conflict wtih the Constitution of the state.

The argument against the constitutionality of the underlying feature of the statute proceeds on two propositions-one that legislative power cannot be delegated, and the other that rate making is a legislative power. Both propositions are true, if not construed too broadly, but each is liable to such misconstruction. To be strictly accurate, the first requires the qualification pointed out by Chief Justice Marshall in Wayman v. Southard, 10 Wheat. (U. S.) 1, 42, 6 L. Ed. 253: ‘It will not be contended that Congress can delegate to the courts, or to any other tribunals, powers which are strictly and exclusively legislative. But Congress may certainly delegate to others powers which the Legislature may rightfully exercise itself.’ If by the second proposition it is intended to assert that the rate-making power being part of the police power is vested in the Legislature, it is true. But if it is intended to go further and deny the power of the Legislature to confer by general laws upon other branches of the government, the duty not only of executing the law, but of determining its application to particular cases and the formulating rules for its exercise, then in my judgment it is not true. A priori reasoning as to the nature and proper distribution of the powers of government is not conclusive on the question of what powers are so inherently legislative as to preclude their delegation in any degree to the other branches of the government. It is now 130 years since the people of this state adopted their first Constitution. Since that time there have been four constitutional conventions, framing new Constitutions, whose work, in whole or part, has been adopted by the people, besides which some extensive amendments have been enacted in the method provided by the Constitution. The people have had ample opportunities to correct any misconception or misconstruction as to their powers on the part of public officers, whether legislative, executive, or judicial; and any exercise of power by the Legislature, which for a long time has passed unchallenged, or, it challenged, has been sustained by the courts, must be deemed to have been approved by the people, unless forbidden by subsequent constitutional provision. There also should be borne in mind that with us the doctrine has always prevailed that the legislative power is plenary, except as limited by the federal and state Constitutions (Bank of Chenango v. Brown, 26 N. Y. 467;People ex rel. McLean v. Rlagg, 46 N. Y. 401;Lawton v. Steele, 119 N. Y. 226, 23 N. E. 878, 7 L. R. A. 134, 16 Am. St. Rep. 813), and that there has never been in this state that sharp line of demarcation between the functions of the three branches of government which obtains in some other jurisdictions.

Let us see what the Legislature has done. When this country was settled, the power to grant an absolute divorce was in England vested in Parliament alone. Following that example the colonial assemblies exercised the same power, though in some colonies provision was made for divorce by judicial decree. The validity of a legislative divorce was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Maynard v. Hill, 125 U. S. 190, 8 Sup. Ct. 723, 31 L. Ed. 654, where the divorce was enacted by the Legislature of the territory of Oregon under a grant from Congress of general legislative power. In this state, and during colonial times, the power remained purely legislative until in the year 1787 a statute was passed by the Legislature, which, after reciting that it was more advisable for the Legislature to make general provision for such cases than to afford relief...