Fisher v. Great Northern Railway Co.

Citations

• 49 Wash. 205
• 95 P. 77
• 1908 Wash. LEXIS 552

Syllabus

<p>Commerce — Regulations—Discriminations—Foreign Traffic — Carriers. The interstate commerce law, 84 Stat. L. p. 584, requiring the posting and publishing of freight rates and charges applies to shipments from a foreign country to be carried from the port of entry to any place in the United States.</p> <p>Same — Discriminatory Charges — Agreements Violating Schedule. When a freight rate has been fixed and properly posted and published by a carrier with reference to shipments regulated by the interstate commerce law, such rate controls the carrier’s charges and lien without regard to a lesser rate agreed to by the carrier, as the latter would be unlawful and unenforcible.</p> <p>Same — Burden of Proof. The burden is upon the carrier to show that its shipping contract, fixing a lesser rate than its published schedule, violates the interstate Commerce law and is unenforcible, where the carrier asserts the invalidity of the contract and seeks to enforce the higher rate.</p> <p>Commerce — Regulations — Discrimination — Agreement in Violation of Interstate Commerce Law — Oceanic Competition. Where a railroad’s published schedule of rates and charges, posted pursuant to the interstate commerce law, fixed a rate of eighty-five cents per hundred pounds on canned goods from the port of S. in Norway to a station in this state, providing that the ocean rate procurable is such as to allow a minimum rate of seventy-five cents per hundred pounds for rail carriage from Atlantic seaboard ports, and provided further that, if the difference between the through rate and the rail line’s minimum of seventy-five cents was less than the ocean proportion, the through rate will be the ocean proportion plus seventy-five cents per hundred pounds, an agreement by the carrier to make the through shipment at the rate of eighty-five cents per hundred pounds is not necessarily in violation of the interstate commerce law, although the best ocean rate procurable at the time was thirty-eight and seve