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January 24, 2007
Big (Bad?) Yellow Taxi
I'd never paid much attention to the case before, so I went and looked it up after class. And as I looked at it, I sort of wanted to clean my glasses to make sure I was seeing it right. It's a 1947 case holding that taxis ferrying people from their homes to an interstate travel depot like a railroad station were outside the reach of the Sherman Antitrust Act because Congress lacked power to regulate them under the interstate commerce clause.
Yellow Cab was overruled on a different point of law by Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U.S. 752 (1984). But so far as I can tell, on the Commerce Clause point, the decision has never been formally overruled, and lower federal courts were still citing it as recently as the 1980s.
Am I missing something here, or is this decision an utterly inexplicable outlier? How can it possibly be that Congress lacks power to block a monopoly in taxi cabs picking up people at their homes and dropping them at a railroad or an airport for interstate or international travel?
UPDATE: A brief email exchange on this with a friend and colleague who shall remain nameless (so as to protect the identity of Orin Kerr) leads me to update this post. A more careful reading of Justice Murphy's opinion for the Court in Yellow Cab reveals that the Court was purporting to interpret not the reaches of the Commerce power, but the reaches of the Sherman Act, when it reasoned that
the common understanding is that a traveler intending to make an interstate rail journey begins his interstate movement when he boards the train at the station and that his journey ends when he disembarks at the station in the city of destination. What happens prior or subsequent to that rail journey, at least in the absence of some special arrangement, is not a constituent part of the interstate movement.In other words, the Yellow Cab Court apparently saw the connection of these local taxi rides to interstate commerce as being so remote that Congress didn't intend the Sherman Act intended to cover them.
For my money, this reasoning comes mighty close to the long-condemned view of the Supreme Court in the 1895 E.C. Knight case that the Sherman Antitrust Act could not reach a monopoly in sugar refining because manufacture precedes interstate commerce and has too indirect an effect on it. That's why I was shocked to see it in a 1947 case. But Yellow Cab purports to be about the Sherman Act rather than the Commerce Clause itself, so that is a distinction that must be noted. (On this point, Murphy's Yellow Cab opinion did not get the votes of Justices Black or Rutledge, and Douglas did not participate. One wonders whether it would command a majority today.)
Posted by Eric at January 24, 2007 4:24 PM
Comments
Prof. Muller:
Is it the same reason that Congress should not be able to regulate indirect water sources under the Clear Water Act?
I once litigated a Clean Water case and had no doubt at the time that the CWA reached the defendant-company's runoff that went down a driveway, into the street, along a a gutter, into a grate, through a pipe, and eventually into the city's sewer system. The company was in the metal-plating business.
But after reading your description of Yellow Cab, I have to say it seems like the perfect way to cut the Clean Water Act's reach. If a people being carried in a cab to get on an interstate train is not commerce, then neither should the toxic runoff from a metal plating business that winds through a city's surface streets and sub-surface pipes on the way to a sewer plant. Right?
Posted by: marc garber at January 24, 2007 9:44 PM
Eric:
I read Yellow Cab before making my earlier comment. And it seems that, as you're saying in your update, the Court was speaking to the scope of the Sherman Act.
My question is this. Is the Sherman Act's "affecting commerce" requirement (however it's worded) interpreted like the Hobbs Act's "affecting commerce" element -- i.e., the broadest reading possible which is coextensive with the Commerce Clause, right?
Because if that's so, then what's the difference between Yellow Cab's reading of "commerce" under the Sherman Act and the Commerce Clause itself?
I'm sure I'm missing something here . . . no doubt the residual stress of failing to understand the president's health care proposal.
Posted by: marc garber at January 25, 2007 9:44 PM
Eric:
Could you elaborate a bit more on what O.K. said. Is Yellow Cab at all useful in dealing with either/both Commerce Clause cases or statutory cases?
For example, how would Yellow Cab square with an argument that a physician's allegedly false claim for a $15 office visit by a patient who drove two blocks to his office did not affect I/C.
I'm just not clear. And some help on this kind of issue would be invaluable, seeing as how nearly all federal criminal statutes are tied to commerce.
Posted by: marc garber at January 26, 2007 11:48 AM
I practiced antitrust law for the first few years of my career (and that was a long time ago) and I have never even heard of this case. I know this is not definitive, but that makes me think it is an outlier.
Posted by: China Law Blog at January 28, 2007 8:44 AM