Shipping Regulation and the Federal Maritime Commission: Part II

the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed the Federal Maritime Commission's decision in the NA UK Investigation. 2 3 The court's decision decided nothing other than that the Commission's remedial orders did not exceed its very limited authority over ratemaking in the foreign liner trades.The court did not decide whether the Commission's interpretation of section 18(b) (5)'s standards of "unreasonableness" and "detriment to commerce" were correct; whether the burden of proof prestidigitation worked by the Iron and Steel rule was fair, let alone lawful; or whether there was sufficient evidence, or any at all, to support the Commission's statutory findings.For the court, the dispositive and sole question was whether the Commission's order, which required the carriers to "justify" their new rates (to be filed in place of those "disapproved") in terms of cost, value of service, and other traditional ratemaking factors, was an undue interference with the carriers' congressionally approved system of ratemaking, as the conferences had argued.In reaching and then deciding this issue in favor of the Commission, the court did not examine and then reject the conferences' strenuous arguments on the foregoing questions; it simply ignored them and assumed the issues which they raised.Consequently, little, if anything, more is known of the probable fate of the FMC's regulatory doctrine in the federal courts after, than before, the NA UK appeal, and the possibility of thorough judicial review of the procedures and legal rules which determined the NA UK outcome is, at least temporarily, foreclosed.The Commission's NA UK decision will doubtless join its Iron and Steel and Boilers antecedents as hard and fast precedent for similar, if not more aggressive, direct rate regulation in the "rate disparities" mold. 224t Member of the Illinois Bar.This is the second installment of a two-part article.