Crowell v. Benson (1932)

Summary

Crowell is one of the most important but least well known cases in this library. It was decided in the Progressive era, when Congress and state legislatures sought to replace old common law rules, often favorable to businesses and defendants, with more progressive statutory schemes. Plaintiffs were also often frustrated by the slow pace of litigation. In Crowell, Congress enacted a workers’ compensation scheme applicable to employment on the navigable waters of the United States (and thus within Congress’s commerce power). The statute empowered an administrative agency—not a judicial court—to determine whether an injury had occurred and the amount of damages. The question in the case was whether allowing an executive branch official (the expert administrative agency) to determine facts upon which the liability of one party to another depends, violates Article III of the Constitution.

The majority held that Congress could empower administrative officers to determine only the fact of injury and the amount of compensation; the dissent wanted the Court to hold that Congress could empower the administrative officers to determine any and all factual questions, including the fact of employment on navigable waters. Neither the majority nor the dissent would have held that all factual questions in such cases must be determined by a judge or jury. To this day, therefore, administrative agencies regularly assess fines and impose penalties on individuals without the participation of a judge or jury.

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Excerpt: Majority Opinion, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes

. . . . Apart from cases involving constitutional rights to be appropriately enforced by proceedings in court, there can be no doubt that the act contemplates that as to questions of fact, arising with respect to injuries to employees within the purview of the act, the findings of the deputy commissioner, supported by evidence and within the scope of his authority, shall be final. To hold otherwise would be to defeat the obvious purpose of the legislation to furnish a prompt, continuous, expert, and inexpensive method for dealing with a class of questions of fact which are peculiarly suited to examination and determination by an administrative agency specially assigned to that task. . . .

[T]here is no requirement that, in order to maintain the essential attributes of the judicial power, all determinations of fact in constitutional courts shall be made by judges. On the common-law side of the federal courts, the aid of juries is not only deemed appropriate but is required by the Constitution itself. In cases of equity and admiralty, it is historic practice to call to the assistance of the courts, without the consent of the parties, masters, and commissioners or assessors, to pass upon certain classes of questions, as, for example, to take and state an account or to find the amount of damages. While the reports of masters and commissioners in such cases are essentially of an advisory nature, it has not been the practice to disturb their findings when they are properly based upon evidence, in the absence of errors of law, and the parties have no right to demand that the court shall redetermine the facts thus found. . . .

A different question is presented where the determinations of fact are fundamental or ‘jurisdictional,’ in the sense that their existence is a condition precedent to the operation of the statutory scheme. These fundamental requirements are that the injury occurs upon the navigable waters of the United States, and that the relation of master and servant exists. These conditions are indispensable to the application of the statute, not only because the Congress has so provided explicitly (section 3), but also because the power of the Congress to enact the legislation turns upon the existence of these conditions. . . .

In relation to these basic facts . . . is the question whether the Congress may substitute for constitutional courts, in which the judicial power of the United States is vested, an administrative agency—in this instance a single deputy commissioner—for the final determination of the existence of the facts upon which the enforcement of the constitutional rights of the citizen depend. The recognition of the utility and convenience of administrative agencies for the investigation and finding of facts within their proper province, and the support of their authorized action, does not require the conclusion that there is no limitation of their use, and that the Congress could completely oust the courts of all determinations of fact by vesting the authority to make them with finality in its own instrumentalities or in the executive department. That would be to sap the judicial power as it exists under the federal Constitution, and to establish a government of a bureaucratic character alien to our system, wherever fundamental rights depend, as not infrequently they do depend, upon the facts, and finality as to facts becomes in effect finality in law. . . .

In cases brought to enforce constitutional rights, the judicial power of the United States necessarily extends to the independent determination of all questions, both of fact and law, necessary to the performance of that supreme function. . . .

Excerpt: Dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis

The courts below held that the respondent was entitled to a trial de novo; that all the evidence introduced before the deputy commissioner should go for naught; and that respondent should have the privilege of presenting new, and even entirely different, evidence in the District Court. . . . The safeguards with which Congress has surrounded the proceedings before the deputy commissioner would be without meaning if those proceedings were to serve merely as an inquiry preliminary to a contest in the courts. Specific provisions of the Longshoremen’s Act make clear that it was the aim of Congress to expedite the relief afforded. . . .

Even if the constitutional power of Congress to provide compensation is limited to cases in which the employer employee relation exists, I see no basis for a contention that the denial of the right to a trial de novo upon the issue of employment is in any manner subversive of the independence of the federal judicial power. . . .

The ‘judicial power’ of Article III of the Constitution is the power of the federal government, and not of any inferior tribunal. There is in that article nothing which requires any controversy to be determined as of first instance in the federal District Courts. The jurisdiction of those courts is subject to the control of Congress. Matters which may be placed within their jurisdiction may instead be committed to the state courts. If there be any controversy to which the judicial power extends that may not be subjected to the conclusive determination of administrative bodies or federal legislative courts, it is not because of any prohibition against the diminution of the jurisdiction of the federal District Courts . . . .

The purpose of these administrative bodies is to withdraw from the courts, subject to the power of judicial review, a class of controversy which experience has shown can be more effectively and expeditiously handled in the first instance by a special and expert tribunal. The proceedings of the deputy commissioners are endowed with every substantial safeguard of a judicial hearing. . . .

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