German Alliance Insurance v. Lewis

233 U.S. 389, 34 S. Ct. 612, 58 L. Ed. 1011, 1914 U.S. LEXIS 1237

• Court: Supreme Court of the United States
• Decided: April 20, 1914
• Docket: 120
• Status: Published

Opinions

After stating the ease as' above,

Mr. Justice McKenna

delivered the opinion of the court.

The specific error complained of is the refusal of the District Court to hold that the act of the State of Kansas is unconstitutional and void as offending the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. To support this charge of .error, complainant asserts that the business of fire insurance is a private business and, therefore, there is no constitutional power in a State to fix the rates and charges for services rendered by it. An exercise of such right, it is contended, is a taking of private property for a public use. The contention is made in various ways and, excluding possible countervailing contentions, it is urged that the act under review cannot be justified as an exercise of the police power or of the power of the State to admit foreign corporations within its borders upon such terms as it may prescribe, or'of any other power possessed by the State; that no State has the power to impose unconstitutipnal burdens either upen private citizens or private corporations engaged in a private business.

¹ The basic contention is that the business of insurance is a natural right, receiving no privilege from the State, is voluntarily entered into, cannot be compelled nor can any of its exercises be compelled; that it concerns personal contracts of indemnity against certain contingencies merely. Whether such contracts shall be made at all, it is contended, is a. matter of private negotiation and agreement, and necessarily there Inust be freedom in fixing their terms. And “where the right to demand and receive service does not exist in the public,, the correlative right of regulation as to rates and charges does not exist.” Many elements, it is urged, determine the extending or rejection of insurance; the hazards are relative and depend upon many circumstances upon which there may be different judgments, and there are personal considerations as well — “moral hazards,” as they are called.

It is not clear to what extent some of these circumstances are urged as affecting the power of regulation in the State. It would seem to be urged that each risk is individual and no rule of rates can be formed or applied. The bill asserts the contrary. It in effect admits that there can be standards and classification of risks, determined by the law of averages. Indeed, it is a matter of common knowledge that rates are fixed and accommodated to those standards and classification in pre-arranged schedules, and, granted the rates may be varied in particular instances, they are sufficiently definite and applicable as a general and practically constant rule. They are the product, it is true, of skill and experience, but such skill and experience a regulating body may have as well as the creating body. Indeed, an allegation in the original bill that the superintendent of insurance could not have the requisite technical and mathematical training to determine whether a basic rate or an actual rate as applied to any particular risk was or was not reasonable and that his conclusion, therefore, “would be a mere guess or arbitrary determination” was omitted by an amendment. It would indeed be a strained contention that the Government could not avail itself, in the exercise of power it might deem wise to exert, of the skill and knowledge possessed by the world. We may put aside, therefore, all merely adventitious consideratiohs and come to the bare and essential one, whether a contract of fire insurance is private and as such has constitutional immunity from regulation. Or, to state it differently and to express an antithetical proposition, is the business of insurance so far affected with a public interest as to justify legislative regulation of its rates? And we mean a broad and definite public interest. In some degree the public interest is concerned in every transaction between men, the sum of the transactions constituting the activities of life. But there is something more special than this, something of= more definite consequence, which makes the public interest that justifies regulatory legislation. We can best explain by examples. The transportation of property — business of common carriers — is obviously of public concern and its regulation is an accepted governmental power. The transmission of intelligence is of cognate .character. There are other utilities which are denominated public, such as the furnishing of water and light, including in the latter gas and electricity. We do not hesitate at their regulation nor at the fixing of the prices which may be charged for their service. The basis of the ready concession of the power of regulation is the public interest. This is not denied, but its application to insurance is so far denied as not to extend to the fixing of rates. It is said, the State has no power to fix the rates charged to the public by either corporations or individuals engaged in a private business, and the “test of whether the use is public or not is whether a public trust is imposed upon the property and whether the public has a legal right to the use which cannot be denied;” or, as we have said, quoting counsel, “Where the right to demand and receive service does not exist in the public, the correlative right of regulation as to rates and charges does not exist.” Cases are cited which, it must be admitted, support the contention. The distinction is artificial. It is, indeed, but the assertion that the cited examples embrace all cases of public interest. The complainant explicitly so contends, urging that the test it applies excludes the idea that there can be a public interest which gives the power of regulation as distinct from a public use which, necessarily, it is contended, can only apply to property, not to personal contracts. The distinction, we think, has no basis in principle (Noble State Bank v. Haskell, 219 U. S. 104), nor has the other contention that the service which cannot be demanded cannot be regulated. .

Munn v. Illinois, 94 U. S. 113, is an instructive example of legislative power exerted in the public interest. The constitution of Illinois declared all elevators or storehouses, where grain or other property was stored for a compensation, to be public warehouses, and a law was subsequently enacted fixing rates of storage.- In other Words, that which had been private property had from its uses become, it was declared, of,public concern and the compensation to be charged for its use prescribed. The law was sustained against the contention that it deprived the owners of the warehouses of their property without due process of law. We can only cite the case and state its principle, not review it at .any length. The principle was expressed to be, quoting Lord Chief Justice Hale, “that when private property is 'affected with a public interest it ceases to be juris privati’ only” and it becomes “clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large”; and, so using it, the owner “grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good.” And it was said that the application of the principle could not bé denied because no precedent could be found for a statute precisely like the one reviewed. It presented a case, the court further said, “for the application of a long-known and well-established principle in social science, and this statute simply extends the law so as to meet this new development of commercial progress.” The principle was expressed as to property, and the instance of its application was to property, but it is manifestly broader than that instance. It is the business that is the fundamental thing; property is but its instrument, the means of rendering the service which has become of public interest.

That the case had broader application than the use of property is manifest from the grounds expressed in the dissenting opinion. The basis of the opinion was that the business regulated was private and had “no special privilege connected with it, nor did the law ever extend to it any greater protection than it extended ¿o all other private business.” The argument encountered opposing examples, among others, the regulation of the rate of interest on money. The regulation was accounted for on the ground that the act of Parliament permitting the charging of some interest was a relaxation, of a prohibition of the common law against charging any interest, but this explanation overlooked the fact that both the common law and the act of Parliament were exercises of government regulation of a strictly private business in the interest of public policy, a policy which still endures and still dictates regulating laws. Against that conservatism of the mind, which puts to question every new act of regulating legislation and regards the legislation invalid or dangerous until it has become familiar, government — state and National — has pressed on in the general welfare; and our reports are full of. cases where in instance after instance the exercise of regulation was resisted and yet sustained against attacks asserted to be justified by the Constitution of the United States. The dread of. the moment having passed, no one is now heard to say that rights were restrained or their constitutional guaranties impaired.

Munn v. Illinois was approved in many state decisions, but it was brought to the review of this court in Budd v. New York, 143 U. S. 517, and its doctrine, after elaborate consideration, re-affirmed, and against the same arguments which are now urged against the Kansas statute. Nowhere have these arguments been, or could be, advanced with greater strength and felicity of expression than in the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Brewer. Every consideration was adduced, based on the private character of the business regulated and, for that reason, its constitutional immunity from regulation, with all the power of argument and illustration of which that great judge was a master. The considerations urged did not prevail. Against them the court opposed the ever-existing police power in government and its necessary exercise for the public good and declared its entire accommodation to the limitations of the; Constitution. The court was not deterred by the charge (repeated in the case at bar) that its decision had the sweeping and dangerous comprehension of subjecting to legislative regulation all of the businesses and affairs of life and the prices o£ all commodities. Whether we may apprehend such result by extending the principle of the cases to fire insurance we shall presently consider.

In Brass v. Stoeser, 153 U. S. 391, Munn v. Illinois and Budd v. New York were affirmed. A law of the State of North Dakota was sustained which made all buildings, elevators and warehouses used for the handling of grain for a profit public warehouses, and fixed a storage rate. The case is important. It extended the principle of the other two cases and denuded it of the limiting element which was supposed to beset it — that to justify regulation of a business 'the business must have a monopolistic character. That distinction was pressed and answered. It was argued, the court said (p. 402), “that the statutes of Illinois and New York [passed on in the Munn and Budd Cases] are intended to operate in great trade centers, where, on account of the business being localized in the hands of a few persons in close proximity to each other, great opportunities for combinations to raise and control elevating and storage charges are afforded, while the wide extent of the State of North Dakota and the small population of its country towns and villages are said to present no such opportunities.” And it was also urged that the method of carrying on business in North Dakota •and the Eastern cities was different, that the elevators in the latter were essentially means of transporting grain from the lakes to the railroads and those who owned them could, if uncontrolled by law, extort such charges as they pleased, and stress was laid upon the expression in the other cases which represented the business as a practical monopoly. A contrast was made between those conditions and those which existed in an agricultural State where land was cheap and limitless in quantity. It was replied that this difference in conditions was “for those who make, not for those who interpret, the laws.” And eónsidering the expressions in the other eases which, it was said, went rather to the expediency of the laws, than to their validity, yet, it was further said, the expressions had their value because the “obvious aim of the reasoning that prevailed was to show that the subject-matter of these enactments fell within the legitimate sphere of legislative power, and that, so far as the laws and Constitution of the United States were concerned, the legislation in question deprived no person of his property without due process of law” (p. 404).

The cases need no explanatory or fortifying comment. They demonstrate that a business, by circumstances and its nature, may rise from private to be of public concern and be subject, in consequence, to governmental regulation. And they demonstrate, to apply the language of Judge Andrews in People v. Budd (117 N. Y. 1, 27), that the attempts made to place the right of public regulation in the cases in which it has been exerted, and of which we have given examples, upon the ground of special privilege conferred by the public on those affected cannot be supported. “The underlying principle is that business of certain kinds holds such a peculiar relation to the public interests that there is superinduced upon it the right of public regulation.” Is the business of insurance within the principle? It would be a bold thing to say that the principle is fixed, inelastic, in the precedents of the past and cannot be applied though modern economic conditions may make necessary or beneficial its application. In other words, to say that government possessed at one time a greater power to recognize the public interest in a business and its regulation to promote the general welfare than government possesses to-day. We proceed then to consider whether the business of insurance is within the principle.

A contract for fire insurance is one for indemnity against loss and is personal. The. admission) however, does not take us far in the solution of the question presented. Its personal character certainly does not of itself preclude regulation, for there are many examples of governmental regulation of personal contracts, and in the statutes of every State in the Union superintendence and control over the business of insurance are exercised, varying in details and extent. We need not particularize in detail. We need only say that there was quite early (in Massachusetts 1837, New York Í853) state provision for what is known as the unearned premium fund or reserve; then came the limitation of dividends, the publishing of accounts, valued policies, standards of policies, prescribing investment, requiring deposits in money or bonds, confining the business to corporations, preventing discrimination in rates, limitation of risks and other regulations equally restrictive. In other words, the State has stepped in and imposed conditions upon the companies, restraining the absolute liberty which businesses strictly private are permitted to exercise.

Those regulations exhibit it to be the conception of the law-making bodies of the country without exception that the business of insurance so far affects the public welfare as to invoke and require governmental regulation. A conception so general cannot be without cause. The universal sense of a people cannot be accidental; its persistence saves it from the charge of unconsidered impulse, and its estimate of insurance certainly has substantial basis. Accidental fires are inevitable and the extent of loss very great. The effect of insurance — indeed, it has been said to be its fundamental object — is to distribute the loss over as wide an area as possible. In other words, the loss is spread over the country, the disaster to an individual is shared by many, the disaster to a community shared by other communities; great catastrophes are thereby lessened, and, it may be, repaired. In assimilation of insurance to a tax, the companies have been said to be the mere machinery by which the inevitable losses by fire are distributed so as to fall as lightly as possible on the public at large, the body of the insured, not the companies, paying the tax. Their efficiency, therefore, and solvency are of great concern. The other objects, direct and indirect, of insurance we need not mention. Indeed, it may be enough to say, without stating other effects of insurance, that a large part of the country’s wealth, subject to uncertainty of loss through fire, is protected by insurance. This demonstrates the interest of the public in it and we need not dispute with the economists that this is the result of the “substitution of certain for uncertain loss” or the diffusion of positive loss over a large group of persons, as we have already said to be certainly one of its effects. We can see, therefore, how it has come to be considered a matter of public concern to regúlate it, and, governmental insurance has its advocates and even examples. Contracts of insurance, therefore, have greater public consequence than contracts between individuals to do or not to do a particular thing whose effect stops with the individuals. We may say in passing that when the effect goes beyond that,' there are many examples of regulation. Holden v. Hardy, 169 U. S. 366 ; Griffith v. Connecticut, 218 U. S. 663; Muller v. Oregon, 208 U. S. 412; Mutual Loan Co. v. Martell, 222 U. S. 225; Schmidinger v. Chicago, 226 U. S. 578; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy R. R. Co. v. McGuire, 219 U. S. 549; Noble State Bank v. Haskell, 219 U. S. 104.

Complainant feels the necessity of accounting for the regulatory state legislation and refers it to the exertion of the police power, but, while expressing the power in the. broad .language of the cases, seeks to restrict its application. Counsel states that this power may be exerted to “pass laws whose purpose,is the health, safety, morals and the general welfare of the people.” The admission is very comprehensive. What makes for the general welfare is necessarily in the first instance a -matter of legislative judgment and a judicial review of such judgment is limited. “The scope of judicial inquiry in deciding the question of power is not to be confused with the scope of legislative considerations in dealing with the matter of policy. Whether the enactment is wise or unwise, whether it is based on sound economic.theory, whether it is the best means to achieve the desired result, whether, in short, the legislative discretion within its prescribed limits should be exercised in a particular manner, are matters for the judgment of the legislature, and the earnest conflict of serious opinion does not suffice to bring them within the range of judicial cognizance.” Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Co. v. McGuire, 219 U. S. 549, 569.

The restrictions upon the legislative power which complainant urges we have discussed, or rather the considerations which take, it is contended, the business of insurance outside of the sphere of the power. To the contention that the business is private we have opposed the conception of the public interest. We have shown that the business of insurance has very definite characteristics, with a reach of influence and consequence beyond and different from that of the ordinary businesses of the commercial world, to pursue which a greater liberty may be asserted. The transactions of the latter are independent and individual, terminating in their effect with the instances. The contracts of insurance may be said to be interdependent. They cannot be regarded singly, or isolatedly, and the effect of their relation is to create a fund of assurance and credit, the companies becoming the depositories of the money of the insured, possessing great power thereby and charged, with great responsibility. How necessary their solvency is, is manifest. On the other hand to the insured, insurance is an asset, a basis of credit. It is practically a necessity to business activity and enterprise. It is, therefore, essentially different from ordinary commercial transactions, and, as we have seen, according to the sense of the world from the earliest times — certainly the sense of the modern world — is of the greatest public concern. It is, therefore, within the principle we have announced.

But it is said that the reasoning of the opinion has the broad reach of subjecting to regulation every act of human endeavor and the price of every article of human use. We might, without much concern, leave our discussion to take care of itself against such misunderstanding or deductions. The principle we apply is definite and old and has, as we have pointed out, illustrating examples. And both by the expression of the principle and the citation of the examples we have tried to confine our decision to the regulation of the business of insurance, it having become “clothed with a public interest,” and therefore subject “to be controlled by the public for the common good.”

If there may be controversy as to the business having such character, there can be no controversy as to what follows from such character if it be established. It is idle, therefore, to debate whether the liberty of contract guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States is more, intimately involved in price regulation than in the other forms of regulation as to the validity of which there is no dispute. The order of their enactment certainly cannot be considered an element in their legality. It would be very rudimentary to say that measures of government are determined by circumstances, by the presence or imminence of conditions, and of the legislative judgment of the means or the policy of removing or preventing them. The power to regulate interstate commerce existed for a century before the interstate Commerce Act was passed, and the Commission constituted by it was not given authority to fix rates until some years afterwards. Of the agencies which those measures were enacted to regulate at the time of the creation of the power, there was no prophecy or conception. Nor was regulation immediate upon their existence. It was exerted only when the size, number and influence of those agencies had so increased and developed as to seem to make it imperative. Other illustrations readily occur which repel the intimation that the inactivity of a power, however prolonged, militates against its legality when it is exercised. United States v. Delaware & Hudson Co., 213 U. S. 366. It is oftener the existence of necessity rather than the prescience of it which dictates legislation. And so with the regulations of the business of insurance. They have proceeded step by step, differing in different jurisdictions. If we are brought to a comparison of them in relation to the power of government, how can it be said that fixing the price of insurance is beyond that power and the other instances of regulation are not? How can it be said that the right to engage in the business is a natural one when it can be denied to individuals and permitted to corporations? How can it be said ■ to have the privilege of a private business when its dividends are restricted, its investments controlled, the form and extent of its contracts prescribed, discriminations in its rates denied and a limitation on its risks imposed? Are not such regulations restraints upon the exercise of the personal right — asserted to be fundamental — of dealing with property freely or engaging in what contracts one may choose and with whom and upon what terms one may choose?

We may venture to observe that the price of insurance is not fixed over the counters of the companies by what Adam Smith calls the higgling of the market, but formed in the councils of the underwriters, promulgated in schedules of practically controlling constancy which the applicant for insurance is powerless to oppose and which, therefore, has led to the assertion that the business of insurance is of monopolistic character and that “it is illusory to speak of a liberty of contract.” It is in the alternative presented of accepting the rates of the companies or refraining from insurance, business necessity impelling if not compelling it, that we may discover the inducement of the Kansas statute, and the problem presented is whether the legislature could regard it of as much moment to the public that they who seek insurance should no more be constrained by arbitrary terms than they who seek transportation by railroads, steam or street, or by coaches whose itinerary may be only a few city blocks, or who seek the use of grain elevators, or be secured in a night’s accommodation at a wayside inn, or in the weight of a five-cent loaf of bread. We do not say this to belittle such rights or to exaggerate the effect of insurance, but to exhibit the principle which exists in all and brings all under the same governmental power.

We have summarized the provisions of the Kansas statute, and it will be observed from them that they attempt to systematize the control of insurance. The statute seeks to secure rates which shall be reasonable both to the insurer and the insured, and as a means to this end it prescribes equality of charges,' forbids initial discrimination or subsequently by the refund of a portion of the rates, or the extension to the insured of any privilege; to this end it requires publicity in the basic schedules and of all of the conditions which affect the rates or the value of the insurance to the insured, and also adherence to the rates as published. Whether the requirements are necessary to the purpose, or — to confine ourselves to that which is under review — whether rate regulation is necessary to the purpose, is a matter for legislative judgment, not judicial.. Our function is only to determine the existence of power.

The bill attacks the statute of Kansas as discriminating against complainant because the statute excludes from its provisions farmers’ mutual insurance companies, organized and doing business under the laws of the State and insuring only farm property. The charge is not discussed in the elaborate brief of counsel, nor does it seem to have been pressed in the lower court. It is, however, covered by the assignments of error.

The provision of the statute is, “That nothing in this act, shall affect farmers’ mutual insurance companies organized and doing business under the laws of this State and insuring only farm property.” The distinction is, therefore, between cooperative insurance companies insuring a special kind of property and all other insurance companies. It is only with that distinction that we are now concerned. There are special provisions in the statutes of Kansas for the organization of cooperative companies and if the statute under review discriminates between them the German Alliance Company cannot avail itself of the discrimination. A citation of cases is not neeessary, nor for the general principle that a discrimination is valid if not arbitrary, and arbitrary in the legislative sense, that is, outside of that wide discretion which a legislature may exercise. A legislative classification may rest on narrow distinctions. Legislation is addressed to evils as they may appear, and even degrees of evil may determine its exercise. Ozan Lumber Co. v. Union County Bank, 207 U. S. 251. There are certainly differences between stock companies, such as complainant is, and the mutual companies described in the bill, and a recognition of the differences we cannot say is outside of the constitutional power of the legislature. Orient Ins. Co. v. Daggs, 172 U. S. 557.

Decree affirmed.

Mr. Justice Lurton was not present when this case was argued, and took no part in its decision.

1 The statute fixing the premium rates on surety bonds was. held to be void in Am. Surety Co. v. Shallenberger, 183 Fed. Rep. 636.