Knoxville Water Co. v. Knoxville, 189 U.S. 434
This opinion was issued on March 23, 1903. It was the standard five pages in length.
This is a complaint for a penalty against the Knoxville Water Company for charging and collecting water rates in excess of the rates fixed by the ordinances of the City of Knoxville.
How in the world is this a Supreme Court case?
The water company pleaded that the ordinances...violated the obligation of contracts between the city and itself, and deprived it of its property and liberty without due process of law, and so was contrary to the Constitution of the United States.
Okay. Fair to say that in no conceivable contemporary universe would this case be considered to raise a federal question, much less to implicate the Constitution. Different world.
It has been a while since I read this opinion and I don't remember it so approaching it from our stated purpose, what it might show of the influence of Holmes' "experience" and his philosophy of pragmatism on his judicial opinions, what might we expect to find here?
In The Path of the Law Holmes wrote that predictability is the non plus ultra of lawyering and judging. To this, very early, point in his time on the Court, Holmes has been deferential to the states, a stance that I cannot clearly connect to the culture of this time, less than forty years removed from the Civil War, a time when I assume the emphasis needed to be on United rather than States, but which does provide some ground, however unsteady, for prediction.
Then there are the facts. They are supposed to control all. A case may be distinguished from precedent because here the car was red but there the car was blue. Facts provide some surface friction but a determined court can motor on over them.
I predict that here, in a dispute between a water company and a local government, that Justice Holmes will side with the government. Let's see.
Ooh. The facts are decidedly not on the water company's side. Holmes:
...the company undertook as follows: "Said company will supply private consumers with water at a rate not to exceed five cents per one hundred gallons"...These are the words relied on by the company.
Clear. But to the water company,
They are assumed to contain an implied undertaking on the part of the city not to interfere with the company in establishing rates within the contract limits.
Oh really, water company? So when the city of Knoxville lowered the rate within the contract limits you were deprived of your constitutional right to property. Get the fuck outta town.
The trouble at the bottom of the company's case is that the supposed promise of the city on which it is founded does not exist.
We discover no error in the record, and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Tennessee must be affirmed.
Judgment affirmed.
