Home Telephone & Telegraph Company v. City Of Los Angeles

227 U.S. 278 (1913)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

P furnishes telephone service in D. P sued D to prevent enforcement of a city ordinance establishing telephone rates for the year commencing July 1, 1911. P claims that D was given a right to fix telephone rates and had passed the assailed ordinance in the exercise of the general authority thus conferred. P claimed that the rates fixed were so unreasonably low that their enforcement would bring about the confiscation of the property and hence the ordinance was repugnant to the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court refused to grant a restraining order or allow a preliminary injunction, and thereafter, on the filing of a formal plea to the jurisdiction, the bill was dismissed for want of power as a Federal court to consider the case. It held that the court could not take jurisdiction as P had never invoked the aid or protection of its said State to prevent the alleged taking of its property, nor has P appealed to the courts of said State, nor to any of them, to enforce the law of said State which mirrored the federal due process clause. The action complained of by P was also repugnant to the due process clause of the state constitution -- there being no diversity of citizenship, there was no Federal jurisdiction. The plea asserted that where, in a given case, taking the facts averred to be true, the acts of state officials violated the Constitution of the United States and likewise because of the coincidence of a state constitutional prohibition were presumptively repugnant to the state constitution, such acts could not be treated as acts of the State within the Fourteenth Amendment, and hence no power existed in a Federal court to consider the subject until by final action of an appropriate state court it was decided that such acts were authorized by the State and were therefore not repugnant to the state constitution. The court dismissed the action for want of jurisdiction as federal courts did not have jurisdiction until after the final disposition of the case by the state court. P appealed.