PACIFIC COAST DAIRY, INC. v. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE OF CALIFORNIA ET AL.
No. 275
Supreme Court of the United States
March 1, 1943
318 U.S. 285
Argued January 12, 13, 1943.
By special leave of Court, Solicitor General Fahy, with whom Assistant Attorney General Shea and Messrs. Archibald Cox and Morton Liftin were on the brief, for the United States, as amicus curiae.
The appellant challenges a judgment of the Supreme Court of California1 dismissing a writ of alternative mandamus and denying a permanent writ to prevent the
Chapter 10 of the
The law empowers the Director of Agriculture to license distributors and to establish marketing areas within which uniform prices and regulations for the sale of milk shall prevail.
The appellant was a licensed distributor doing business in the Santa Clara County marketing area, in which there were in effect a stabilization and marketing plan and schedules of minimum wholesale and retail prices. It entered into a contract with the War Department of the United States, signed by the Quartermaster‘s Department of Moffett Field, to sell milk to the Department at Moffett Field, which lies within the boundaries of the Santa Clara County marketing area, at less than the minimum price fixed for the area. Sales and deliveries under the contract took place on Moffett Field.
A complaint was filed with the Department of Agriculture charging the appellant violated
“The purchasing, processing, bottling, transporting, delivering or otherwise handling in any marketing area of any fluid milk or fluid cream which is to be or is sold or otherwise disposed of by such distributor at any place in the geographical area within the outer, outside and external boundaries or limits of such marketing area, whether such place is a part of the marketing area or not, at less than the minimum wholesale and minimum retail prices effective in such marketing area.”
This section did not appear in the Code until 1941,3 when it was added as an amendment. California recognized its lack of power to fix retail prices for milk sold within federal enclaves located in the State.4 But the legislature desired to accomplish this. In 1941 it memorialized Congress, requesting passage of a federal law requiring purchasing officers of the armed services purchasing food supplies for troops or agencies of the United States located in the State to refuse bids for milk at prices below those fixed under the California Milk Stabilization Law or amendments thereof.5 The memorial was referred to the Committee on Agriculture of the House and to the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry of the Senate,6 but was never acted upon by either committee. Congress having failed to act,
The appellant sought a writ of mandamus from the court below to restrain the Department of Agriculture from proceeding to hear and act upon the pending complaint. An alternative writ issued. After return by the appellees, setting up only that the complaint failed to state facts sufficient to constitute a cause of action, the court discharged the alternative writ and denied a peremptory writ. The facts we have recited appear in the petition for the writ or are matters of which the court below and this court take judicial notice.
The Supreme Court of California overruled the appellant‘s contentions that the state‘s conceded control of activities within its jurisdiction gave it no authority to penalize transactions occurring on Moffett Field; that the state law violates the commerce clause of
When the federal government acquired the tract, local law not inconsistent with federal policy remained in force until altered by national legislation.10 The state statute involved was adopted long after the transfer of sovereignty and was without force in the enclave. It follows that contracts to sell and sales consummated within the enclave cannot be regulated by the California law. To hold otherwise would be to affirm that California may ignore the Constitutional provision that “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land; . . .”11 It would be a denial of the federal power “to exercise exclusive Legislation.”12 As respects such federal territory Congress has the combined powers of a general and a state government.13
The answer of the State and of the court below is one of confession and avoidance,—confession that the law in fact operates to affect action by the appellant within federal territory, but avoidance of the conclusion of invalidity by the assertion that the law in essence is the regulation of conduct wholly within the state‘s jurisdiction.
In the light of the history of the legislation, we are constrained to find that the true purpose was to punish California‘s own citizens for doing in exclusively federal territory what by the law of the United States was there lawful, under the guise of penalizing preparatory conduct occurring in the State,—to punish the appellant for a transaction carried on under sovereignty conferred by
We have this day held in Penn Dairies v. Milk Control Commission, ante, p. 261, that a different decision is required where the contract and the sales occur within a state‘s jurisdiction, absent specific national legislation excluding the operation of the state‘s regulatory laws. The conclusions may seem contradictory; but in preserving the balance between national and state power, seemingly inconsequential differences often require diverse results. This must be so, if we are to accord to various provisions of fundamental law their natural effect in the circumstances disclosed. So to do is not to make subtle or tech-
The judgment is reversed and the cause remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
Reversed.
MR. JUSTICE RUTLEDGE took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.
MR. JUSTICE BLACK, MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS and MR. JUSTICE JACKSON:
While we have joined in the opinion of the Court, we are also of the view that the judgment below should be reversed for the additional reason set forth in the dissenting opinion in Penn Dairies v. Milk Control Commission, ante, p. 261.
MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER, dissenting:
Both Pennsylvania and California, as part of their control over the supply and distribution of milk for the needs of their people, regulate the prices at which milk may be sold within the state. In both states, more particularly at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation, Pennsylvania, and at Moffett Field, California, units of the United States Army are stationed. At each of these sites the contracting officer, a junior officer in the Quartermaster Corps, invites bids for the sale of milk to the Army. Are these two con-
In Penn Dairies v. Milk Control Commission, ante, p. 261, Penn Dairies, a milk dealer of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, supplied milk for the use of the Army at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation. Their sales were the result of successful bidding at prices below the minima fixed by the Pennsylvania Milk Control Law. Subsequently, when Penn Dairies applied for renewal of its license to do business under state law, the Pennsylvania Milk Control Commission denied the application on the ground that the sales to the Army were not immune from the minimum price provisions of the Pennsylvania law. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court sustained this determination.
In this case, Pacific Coast Dairy, a milk dealer of San Francisco, California, supplied milk for the use of the Army at Moffett Field, about thirty-five miles from San Francisco. Their sales, too, were the result of successful bidding at prices below those fixed by California law. For thus departing from the price provisions of the state law under which it was licensed to do business, the California Department of Agriculture instituted proceedings to revoke Pacific Coast Dairy‘s license. To stay these proceedings the dairy sought a writ of mandamus, which was denied by the Supreme Court of California.
In my view, the Court in upholding the refusal by Pennsylvania to renew a license because of an arrangement made on behalf of the Government must imply that the contracting officer of the Indiantown Military Gap Reservation was not authorized to accept bids below the minimum price requirements set by Pennsylvania for the sale of milk within the state. In the California case, how-
Legal refinements are not always the worse for eluding the quick understanding of a layman. But I do not believe that in determining the duty of contracting officers serving the same Army function—a matter that turns on considerations of policy in the relation of the various Army posts to the states in which they are situated—legal categories compel a difference in result where practical judgment and experience lead to an identity in result. The power given to Congress by
Since exclusive authority need not be exercised by Congress, there is at times “uncertainty and confusion” whether jurisdiction belongs to the federal Government or has been left with the state. Bowen v. Johnston, 306 U. S. 19, 27. And although the acts of cession may leave “no room for doubt” that “jurisdiction” “remained with the State,” “administrative construction” may nevertheless generate federal jurisdiction. Id., at 29. Even where the federal Government supposedly has “exclusive” jurisdiction, a close examination of complicated legislation may uphold excise tax provisions of a state alcoholic beverage control law but not provisions that “go beyond aids
Enough has been said to show that the doctrine of “exclusive jurisdiction” over federal enclaves is not an imperative. The phrase is indeed a misnomer for the manifold legal phases of the diverse situations arising out of the existence of federally-owned lands within a state—problems calling not for a single, simple answer but for disposition in the light of the national purposes which an enclave serves. If Congress speaks, state power is of course determined by what Congress says. If Congress makes the law of the state in which there is a federal site as foreign there as is the law of China, then federal jurisdiction would really be exclusive. But short of such Congressional assertion of overriding authority, the phrase “exclusive jurisdiction” more often confounds than solves problems due to our federal system.
It is certainly an irrelevant factor in the legal equation before us. For in neither the Pennsylvania nor the California case is the power of Congress or of appropriately exercised military authority called into question. As to Pennsylvania, the Court has found that neither Congressional legislation nor discernible legislative policy immunized a government contractor from state regulation. Of course, if Congressional policy, howsoever expressed,
Can it be that the considerations of policy which resulted in a finding that neither the Constitution nor Congressional authority nor appropriate military regulation enabled the Army contracting officer in Pennsylvania, in supplying milk to the soldiers stationed in Pennsylvania, to free local dealers from the necessity of complying with
These are not far-fetched suppositions. They are the inevitable practical consequences of making decision here depend upon technicalities of “exclusive jurisdiction“—legal subtleties which may become relevant in dealing with prosecution for crime, devolution of property, liability for torts, and the like, but which as a matter of good sense surely are wholly irrelevant in defining the duty of contracting officers of the United States in making contracts in the various States of the Union, where neither Congress nor the authoritative voice of the Army has spoken. In the absence of such assertion of superior authority, state laws such as those here under consideration appear, as a matter of sound public policy, equally appropriate whether the federal territory encysted within a state be held on long or short term lease or be owned by the Government on whatever terms of cession may have been imposed.
We are not dealing here with the authority of Congress, about which there can be no controversy, but with the authority of Government contracting officers. It is surely the policy of neither Congress nor the Army that such
MR. JUSTICE MURPHY, dissenting:
I dissent for reasons stated in concurrence in Penn Dairies v. Milk Control Commission, ante, p. 261. The fact that Moffett Field is a federal enclave instead of a leasehold does not justify denying California the power to protect the public health by requiring milk dealers selling to the United States to receive a minimum price, a power which we have today held that Pennsylvania possesses. True, Congress is given the power “to exercise exclusive legislation” over federal areas such as Moffett Field (
We derive much of our strength as a nation from our dual system of federal government. To promote the harmonious working of that system the general clauses of the Constitution which broadly delineate the boundaries of state and national power should be construed by appraising the respective state and national interests involved and striking a balance which gives appropriate recognition to the legitimate concerns of each government. Since those boundaries are not absolutes, the question necessarily is one of reasonableness and degree. Cf. Holmes, J., dissenting in Panhandle Oil Co. v. Knox, 277 U. S. 218, 222, and again in Springer v. Philippine Islands, 277 U. S. 189, 209-210. This is the method which we have applied in testing state regulation of interstate commerce,1 and it should govern the construction of the “exclusive legislation” clause. If a state is acting in matters normally within its competence, with which it is especially equipped to deal, to achieve important governmental ends such as the protection of the public health and welfare or the maintenance of orderly marketing conditions, the effects of its action should be allowed to extend into federal areas within its
The “exclusive legislation” clause has not been regarded as absolutely exclusory,2 and no convincing reason has been advanced why the nature of the federal power is such that it demands that all state legislation adopted subsequent to the acquisition of an enclave must have no application in the area. In waging war under modern conditions it is essential that state and national, military and civilian authorities, work together as a unit, each complementing the others. The state governments have functions to perform that are vital to the war program, including those functions pertaining to the public health. So long as there is no overriding national purpose to be served, nothing is gained by making federal enclaves thorns in the side of the States and barriers to the effective state-wide performance of those functions. Indeed both the federal government and the nation as a whole suffer if the solution of legitimate matters of local concern is thus thwarted and local animosity created for no purpose.
If Congress exercises its paramount legislative power over Moffett Field to deny California the right to do as it has sought to do here, the matter is of course at an end. But until Congress does so, it should be the aim of the federal military procurement officers to observe statutes such as this established by state action in furtherance of the public health and welfare, and otherwise so conduct their affairs as to promote public confidence and good will.