RAILWAY LEGISLATION 21$ 



Company v. Illinois, 1 decided by the supreme court of Illinois 

 along the lines of the decisions in the Granger cases, was carried 

 to the United States Supreme Court, and gave rise to a decision 

 that no state can exercise any control over commerce which 

 passes beyond its limits. This decision, which has ever since 

 been accepted as the correct interpretation of the federal con- 

 stitution on the subject, put an end to the attempts of state 

 governments to regulate interstate commerce and gave an 

 added impetus to the movement which resulted in the enact- 

 ment by Congress of the interstate commerce act of 1887.2 



The principle that the right of a state to fix maximum rates 

 is unlimited and therefore not subject to judicial review was 

 practically unquestioned for nine years after the decision of 

 the Granger cases. In 1885, however, Chief -Justice Waite, 

 in delivering an opinion in the Mississippi case of Stone v. Far- 

 mers' Loan and Trust Company, 3 intimated that the courts 

 would interfere to prevent such regulation as would amount 

 to " a taking of private property for public use without just 

 compensation, or without due process of law." This was a 

 mere obiter dictum in this case; but it left the status of the law 

 on the point in doubt until finally, in 1890, in Chicago, Mil- 

 waukee and St. Paul Railway Company v. Minnesota, 4 the 

 Supreme Court declared a Minnesota law invalid because it 

 denied a judicial hearing as to reasonableness of rates. There 

 has been considerable doubt as to the exact scope of this decision. 

 Justice Bradley prepared a long and vigorous dissenting opinion, 

 concurred in by Justices Gray and Lamar, in which he declared 

 that it practically overruled the Granger cases. On the other 

 hand, in Budd v. New York, decided in 1892, the court seemed 

 to return in a measure to the older position and denied that 

 the Granger cases had been reversed. Step by step, however, 

 the courts have since been building up the doctrine of judicial 



1 118 United States, 557. 



2 Cf. Hudson, The Railways and the Republic (3d ed., 1889), 329 and note; 

 Cullom Committee, Report, i. 34-38; Johnson, American Railway Transportation, 

 359-361. 



3 116 United States, 307. 



4 134 United States, 418. 



