Security Services, Inc. v. Kmart Corp., 511 U.S. 431, 21 (1994)

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Cite as: 511 U. S. 431 (1994)

Thomas, J., dissenting

mine what information shall be included in tariffs. See 996 F. 2d, at 1525-1526. The court failed, however, to consider the relationship of the rule to the Act as a whole. Viewed in isolation, any remedy designed to enforce a regulation promulgated under the Act might be said to be "adjunct" to the relevant provision of the Act, but Maislin makes clear that the Act must be considered in its entirety. "[A]lthough . . . the Commission may have discretion to craft appropriate remedies for violations of the statute"—and, possibly, violations of its regulations—the remedy may not "effectively rende[r] nugatory the requirements of §§ 10761 and 10762" and thereby "conflic[t] directly with the core purposes of the Act." Maislin, 497 U. S., at 133.

Viewed in this light, it is clear that far from being "directly adjunct" to a statutory power of the Commission, the void-for-nonparticipation rule is directly contrary to the Act's commands and, indeed, to the essence of the filed rate doctrine. The rule nullifies an effective tariff—that is, one that has been filed and gone into effect, § 10762(a)(2), and has not been suspended or set aside by the Commission or canceled by the carrier—without "any agency action at all," ante, at 442, and allows to stand a rate negotiated between a carrier and a shipper but never filed. Like the policy contested in Maislin, the void-for-nonparticipation rule thus "undermines the basic structure of the Act" by sanctioning adherence to an unfiled rate. 497 U. S., at 132.3

3 When the Commission displaces or finds inapplicable a particular filed rate under other sections of the Act expressly authorizing it to do so, that rate is generally replaced either by a reasonable rate prescribed by the Commission, see 49 U. S. C. § 10704(b), or by a different filed rate. See Maislin, 497 U. S., at 129, n. 11 ("None of our cases involving a determination by the ICC that the carrier engaged in an unreasonable practice have required departure from the filed tariff schedule altogether; instead, they have required merely the application of a different filed tariff"); ICC v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 467 U. S. 354, 358 (1984). As Justice Ginsburg explains, see post, at 457-458, by sanctioning a rate negotiated by the parties, the Commission, now with the Court's approval, condones

451

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