The Interstate Commerce Commission - Disintegration of an American Legal Institution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our nation's first independent regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC or Commission), will celebrate its centennial anniversary in 1987. Throughout much of its history, the ICC has been regarded as among the most competent and highly respected governmental agencies. Presidents traditionally have selected Commissioners for the ICC almost as carefully as they have chosen justices of the United States Supreme Court, emphasizing their competence, integrity, and ability to apply the law with skill and reason. On the ICC's fiftieth anniversary, one contemporary commentator commended the agency for its vigorous and spirited administration of the law. The Commission also received high praise for its fidelity to congressional mandate and for its prudent, nonpartisan protection of the public interest. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter heralded the seventy-fifth anniversary of the ICC in even more glowing terms. He lauded the ICC as an institution of unblemished character, with fastidious regard for responsibility, a complete divorcement between public and private interest, and all other concomitants of a true and worthy conception of public duty.Contemporary observations about the Commission, however, suggest that it has lost the abundance of character, competence, and independence that Justice Frankfurter recognized. Recent statements suggest that many observers view the Commission with contempt. What has happened to this venerable and highly respected legal institution of the American Government? How could an agency on the pinnacle of integrity, competence, and independence fall to the depths of irresponsibility in so short a period of time?This Article focuses on the recent and unfortunate demise of the ICC. In particular, it reviews the activities that have stimulated much of the contemporary criticism of the ICC-its ultra vires and arbitrary and capricious actions in the area of interstate motor carrier regulation that have greatly exceeded the authority that Congress delegated to the ICC pursuant to article 1, section 8 of the Constitution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".