9 Filed Rate Doctrine: The 'Filed Rate' Is the Only Lawful Rate

• Author: Scott Hempling
• Pages: 303-323

9.A. Filed rates: Purposes and principles

9.B. Commission decisions constrain courts

9.B.1. Federal courts

9.B.2. State courts

9.C. Federal commission decisions constrain state commissions

9.D. Commission must respect its own rates

9.E. Application to market-based rates

9.E.1. Antitrust and contract damages unavailable

9.E.2. “Retroactivity” allowed if seller has violated a market rate condition

9.F. Application to antitrust law

9.G. Application to non-rate terms and conditions

9.H. Fraud does not block the led rate defense

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Filed Rate Doctrine

The “Filed Rate” Is the Only Lawful Rate

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Rate lings . . . are the essential characteristic of a rate-regulated industry.1

9.A. Filed rates: Purposes and principles

A railroad passenger buys a train ticket. The ticket agent misquotes the price at below the

railroad’s led tariff rate. When the railroad catches the error, the passenger has to pay

the difference.“[T]he rate of the carrier duly led is the only lawful charge. . . . Ignorance

or misquotation of rates is not an excuse for paying or charging either less or more than

the rate led.”2

Welcome to the led rate doctrine. Its legal source is mundane statutory language, like

Missouri’s:

No corporation shall charge, demand, collect or receive a greater or less or different

compensation for any service rendered or to be rendered than the rates and charges

applicable to such services as specied in its schedule led [with the Commission] and

in effect at the time.3

Its message is simple: The only legal rate is the led rate, the one in the commission’s pub-

lic les: “The legal rights of shipper as against carrier in respect to a rate are measured by

the published tariff. Unless and until suspended or set aside [by the regulator], this rate is

made, for all purposes, the legal rate.”4 Whether the commission has acted on the rate is

irrelevant: “It is the ling of the tariffs, and not any afrmative approval or scrutiny by

the agency, that triggers the led rate doctrine.”5

The doctrine’s original goal was to prevent discrimination. Prior to the Interstate Com-

merce Act, “railroad companies often charged substantially higher rates on noncompetitive

routes, granted secret discounts to preferred shippers, and overcharged competitors of

1. MCI Telecomms. Corp. v. AT&T Co., 512 U.S. 218, 231 (1994).

2. Louisville & Nashville R.R. Co. v. Maxwell, 237 U.S.94, 97 (1915). While this agent’s error appeared

to be unintentional, that was not always the case:

Past experience shows that billing clerks and other agents of carriers might easily become experts

in the making of errors and mistakes in the quotation of rates to favored shippers, while other

shippers, less fortunate in their relations with carriers and whose trafc is less important, would

be compelled to pay the higher published rates.

Poor v. Chi., Burlington & Quincy Ry. Co., 12 I.C.C. 418, 421–22 (1907) (quoted in Maislin Indus.,

U.S., Inc. v. Primary Steel, Inc., 497 U.S. 116, 127–28 (1990)).

3. M. R. S. § 393.140(11).

4. Keogh v. Chi. & Nw. Ry. Co., 260 U.S. 156, 163 (1922).

5. Town of Norwood v. FERC, 202 F.3d 408, 419 (1st Cir. 2000).

Chapter Nine304

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