Ewing v. Mytinger & Casselberry/Dissent Frankfurter

by Felix Frankfurter

United States Supreme Court

339 U.S. 594

Ewing  v.  Mytinger & Casselberry

 Argued: April 19-20, 1950. --- Decided: May 29, 1950

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, dissenting.

While I agree with the Court as to the constitutional and statutory issues canvassed in its opinion, I am unable to answer Mr. Justice JACKSON'S dissent, and I must therefore yield to it.

Of course Congress may constitutionally vest judicially unreviewable discretion in an executive agency to initiate multiple suits in order to stop trafficking in pernicious drugs or even in those that are harmless, where efficacy is misrepresented. I agree that it has done so in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. 52 Stat. 1040, 21 U.S.C. § 301 et seq., 21 U.S.C.A. § 301 et seq. But it does not at all follow that Congress has thereby cut off the right of access to the courts to prove that the enforcing agency has not acted within the broadest bounds of fair discretion, rare as the occasion may be for such an attempt and however improbable its success.

Such I understand to be the nature of the proceedings below and such the basis of the District Court's decree. Unless we can say, as I cannot, that the findings in support of it have no support in the evidence, we should not hold that the court below was without jurisdiction to entertain the suit.

The limited claim which the District Court sustained falls precisely within the qualification left open by this Court in a leading case sustaining the power of Congress to vest unreviewable discretion in executive agencies. When the Court was urged to deny this power of Congress and 'extreme cases' were put showing 'how reckless and arbitrary might be the action of Executive officers,' the Court made this answer:

'It will be time enough to deal with such cases as and when they arise. Suffice it to say that the courts have rarely, if ever, felt themselves so restrained by technical rules that they could not find some remedy, consistent with the law, for acts whether done by government or by individual persons, that violated natural justice or were hostile to the fundamental principles devised for the protection of the essential rights of property.' Monongahela Bridge Co. v. United States, 216 U.S. 177, 195, 30 S.Ct. 356, 361, 54 L.Ed. 435.

Mr. Justice Harlan, speaking for the Court, cast its thought in the language current at the time. But the thought behind the words is not outmoded and controls, I believe, the case before us.

Notes