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