State ex rel. Conway v. Southern Pacific Co.

• Decision Date: 23 December 1943
• Docket Number: Civil 4525
• Citation: 145 P.2d 530,61 Ariz. 66
• Parties: STATE OF ARIZONA, ex rel. Joe Conway, Attorney General of the State of Arizona, Appellant, v. SOUTHERN PACIFIC COMPANY, a Corporation, Appellee
• Court: Arizona Supreme Court

145 P.2d 530

61 Ariz. 66

STATE OF ARIZONA, ex rel. Joe Conway, Attorney General of the State of Arizona, Appellant, v. SOUTHERN PACIFIC COMPANY, a Corporation, Appellee

Civil No. 4525

Supreme Court of Arizona

December 23, 1943

APPEAL from a judgment of the Superior Court of the County of Pma. Levi S. Udall, Judge. Judgment reversed.

Mr. Joe Conway, Attorney General, Mr. Earl Anderson, Chief Assistant Attorney General, and Mr. Charles L. Strouss, of Counsel, for Appellant.

Mr Cleon T. Knapp, Mr. James P. Boyle, and Mr. B. G. Thompson of Tucson, Arizona; Mr. Henley C. Booth, and Mr. Burton Mason, of San Francisco, California, for Appellee.

OPINION

STANFORD, J.

This action is brought under the provisions of Section 69-119 Arizona Code Annotated, 1939 (Laws 1913, Referendum, p. 15; Sections 2166-2168, Revised Statutes of Arizona, 1913, Civil Code; Section 647, Revised Code of Arizona, 1928), being the act commonly called the Train Limit Law, and was brought for the purpose of recovering from defendant penalties as provided by the act. The charge in the complaint is that on March 12, 1940, the defendant operated a passenger train of more than 14 cars, and on April 4, 1940, the defendant operated a freight train of more than 70 cars, in violation of said law.

The aforesaid statute reads as follows:

"Section 1. It shall be unlawful for any person, firm, association, company or corporation, operating any railroad in the State of Arizona, to run, or permit to be run, over his, their, or its line or road, or any portion thereof, any train consisting of more than seventy freight, or other cars, exclusive of caboose.

"Section 2. It shall be unlawful for any person, firm, association, company or corporation, operating any railroad in the State of Arizona, to run, or permit to be run, over his, their, or its line or road, or any portion thereof, any passenger train consisting of more than fourteen cars.

"Section 3. Any person, firm, association, company or corporation, operating any railroad in the State of Arizona, who shall wilfully violate any of the provisions of this act, shall be liable to the State of Arizona for a penalty of not less than one hundred dollars, nor more than one thousand dollars, for each offense; and such penalty shall be recovered and suits therefor brought by the Attorney General, or under his direction, in the name of the State of Arizona, in any county through which such railway may be run or operated, provided, however, that this act shall not apply in cases of engine failure between terminals.

"Section 4. All acts and parts of acts in conflict with the provisions of this act are hereby repealed."

The case was tried in Tucson, Pima County, Arizona, before the Honorable Levi S. Udall, Judge of the Superior Court of Apache County, Arizona, to whom it had been assigned.

By the judgment rendered it was held that the Train Limit Law of Arizona, as set forth in the sections above quoted, was unconstitutional and void because:

"First: Said statute invades the exclusive legislative field of Congress, as limited and defined by the Commerce Clause (par. 3, of Sec. 8, Art. 1) of the Constitution of the United States;

"Second: Said statute imposes direct, unreasonable and unlawful burdens upon, and interferes with, delays and obstructs interstate commerce, in violation of said Commerce Clause;

"Third: Said statute impairs the use and usefulness of the transportation facilities employed by defendant as a common carrier engaged in interstate commerce;

"Fourth: Said statute is in conflict with and infringes upon, and amounts to an unlawful attempt to supplement, the power-brake provisions of the Federal Safety Appliance Acts, and the safety-device provisions of Section 25 [26] of the Interstate Commerce Act, which Federal statutes operate upon the same subject matter and are directed to the same objects as said Train-Limit Law and by which said statutes Congress has completely and exclusively occupied the field of regulation of train lengths;

"Fifth: Said statute operates unreasonably and arbitrarily to deprive defendant of its property, without due process of law, in violation of both the Due-Process Clauseof the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and the Due-Process Clause set forth in Section 4 of Article 2 of the Constitution of the State of Arizona;"

Appellee has admitted the operation of the trains as alleged in the complaint, but alleged that each of said trains consisted in a large part of cars moving in Interstate Commerce and carrying interstate traffic, and in further explanation of appellee's case, we quote as follows:

"... and denied that either of said operations was a wilful violation of the law. For a further separate and affirmative defense to the complaint, appellee alleged that the law was and is void, invalid and unconstitutional, because in violation of the Commerce Clause (Article I, section 8, para. 3) of the Constitution of the United States, the Due-Process Clause of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, and the corresponding Due-Process Clause set forth in Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution of Arizona, in that: (a) the law undertakes to regulate a subject-matter of national concern which, if required to be regulated at all, is subject to regulation only by Congress pursuant to the powers granted by the Commerce Clause; (b) the necessary effect of the law is to regulate appellee's train operations extra-territorially, that is to say, beyond the boundaries of Arizona; (c) the law directly and substantially interferes with, delays, and regulates appellee's interstate train operations in Arizona and the adjacent states; (d) the law imposes direct and substantial burdens upon the appellee's interstate train operations; (e) the law, to the extent that it has, or is intended or claimed to have, the effect of limiting the number of cars in a train to that number which can be safely and effectively controlled or stopped by the use of air brakes and other appurtenances now in use on such trains, is in conflict with and an infringement upon existing Federal legislation having the same or similar purposes, enacted by Congress pursuant to its powers under the Commerce Clause; (f) the law deprives appellee of its property unreasonably and arbitrarily, in violation of the due process clauses of the State and Federal Constitutions above referred to, for the reason, among others, that it bears no reasonable relation to health or safety, its ostensible objects, and does not eliminate or reduce any present hazard, but on the contrary creates certain hazards which would not otherwise exist, and increases other hazards of railroad operation in numerous respects."

In 1912, the year Arizona became a state, several measures were referred, under the Constitutional Act of Initiative and Referendum to the people after their passage by the Legislature. Among those measures, besides the one in question, the Train Limit Law, each had to do with the regulation through the police power of the state of railroads in Arizona for the health and safety of its employees and traveling public. That will be observed, first, by the act regulating the number of men to be employed on trains and engines; second, by the act regulating head lights on all locomotives (for example, in this particular act, it was required that locomotive engines used in the transportation of trains over railroads should install electric head lights of a certain power); and third, by the act to require certain tests of service before a person could serve as a locomotive engineer or train conductor. It can be easily seen that all of these acts, including the one in question in this action, were made the laws of this state for the purpose of the safety and protection of employees and of the people being transported over the railroads in our state.

Appellee contends in its brief, as it did by a statement before the court in argument, that "... it is much more probable that the law was advocated and passed as a measure to promote and preserve -- make static -- the employment of railroad trainmen. Certainly that is its most obvious practical (but extra-legal) purpose and, as experience has shown, one of its principal results." We have just quoted the title to other acts, as well as this one, enacted in the year 1912 by the State Legislature. All of them have to do with the regulation of the handling of trains in order to protect the employees or traveling public as will be seen by the various acts, and no other reason could possibly be assigned to those acts, including, as stated, the one in question here. The case of State v. Pate, 47 N.M. 182, 138 P.2d 1006, states: "The courts do not inquire into the motives of the legislature."

16 C.J.S., Constitutional Law, page 277, § 100, has the following to say in connection with legislative acts:

" It will be presumed that the legislature, in passing a statute, acted advisedly and with full knowledge of existing facts and conditions on which its legislation is based, and that no general laws are ever passed either through want of information on the part of the legislature or because it was misled by false representations of interested parties. It will also be presumed that the legislature carefully inverstigated and properly determined that the interests of the public required the enactment of particular legislation. So, the court will presume that the legislature in enacting a regulatory measure had adequate knowledge of the evils sought to be corrected and did not act arbitrarily or unreasonably."

In State v. Wisconsin Telephone Co., 169 Wis. 198, 172 N.W. 225, 226, it is said:

" The term 'police power'...