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Until the Cows Come Home: Stray Voltage and the Filed Rate Doctrine

By Eric L. Lipman

While the Minnesota Supreme Court continues to consider the reach of the filed-rate doctrine as a bar to judicial consideration of claims filed by ratepayers against their utilities (as I noted here and here), yesterday, a panel of the Minnesota Court of Appeals touched upon this same question in a parallel and unrelated case.

In a rigorous and very scholarly opinion by Judge Harriet Lansing, the panel held that the filed-rate doctrine barred claims for injunctive relief, but would not foreclose court consideration of certain other claims for monetary relief. At issue in the specific case was whether a set of dairy farmers could maintain tort claims against their electric utility for the damage to their farm?s milk production. The farmers claimed that the utility negligently permitted excessive stray voltage to escape from a transmission line that traversed the farm - damaging their cows and suppressing the production of milk.

Concluding that the proper resolution of such claims were not within the special competence of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, but instead ?inherently judicial,? Judge Lansing wrote:

First, the MPUC does not have the capacity to address the Siewerts? claims for compensatory damages in tort, because nowhere in the enabling statutes does the legislature give it authority to provide this type of damages.

Second, even acknowledging the relative complexity of electrical-distribution systems, resolving the issues of fact presented by the Siewerts is not beyond ?the conventional experience of judges.?

And, third, the resolution of fact issues underlying the Siewerts? claims does not require ?the exercise of administrative discretion? or create an administrative need for ?uniformity and consistency.? Deciding whether specific facts meet the elements of a tort claim is not uniquely suited to an administrative agency, but instead is regularly decided by juries. The claims do not turn on a safety standard that requires definitive uniformity. The common-law principles underlying resolution of negligence actions will provide the necessary uniformity and consistency.

The panel?s complete analysis is accessible here.

Full post as published by Within the Scope on December 10, 2008 (boomark / email).