concluding Legislature may delegate authority to the former State Board of Insurance under the statute’s “encourages misrepresentation” provision; the “standards the Supreme Court (of the United States) has held adequate include ‘just and reasonable,’ ‘public interest,’ ‘unreasonable obstruction to navigation,’ ‘reciprocally unequal and unreasonable,’ ‘public convenience, interest, or necessity,’ ‘tea of inferior quality,’ ‘unfair methods of competition,’ ‘reasonable variations,’ ‘unduly or unnecessarily complicate the structure’ of a holding company system or ‘unfairly or inequitably distribute voting power among security holders’”
How later courts described this case
- concluding Legislature may delegate authority to the former State Board of Insurance under the statute’s “encourages misrepresentation” provision; the “standards the Supreme Court (of the United States) has held adequate include ‘just and reasonable,’ ‘public interest,’ ‘unreasonable obstruction to navigation,’ ‘reciprocally unequal and unreasonable,’ ‘public convenience, interest, or necessity,’ ‘tea of inferior quality,’ ‘unfair methods of competition,’ ‘reasonable variations,’ ‘unduly or unnecessarily complicate the structure’ of a holding company system or ‘unfairly or inequitably distribute voting power among security holders’”
- recognizing the importance of a separation of powers and holding that the State Board of Insurance was acting in a judicial capacity when it acted to approve a particular policy form
- holding that, on judicial review of an agency’s decision, the trial court is “without authority to substitute a nonstatutory standard for that prescribed by the statute”
- holding that trial de novo in administrative context requires retrial "as if no trial whatever has been had in the court below’’
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
MR. JUSTICE GRIFFIN
dissenting.
I cannot agree with the majority opinion and I therefore respectfully dissent.
I dissent from the holding that the matter of the content and form of insurance policy provisions can be tried de novo. The content and form of insurance policies most certainly are administrative matters and not judicial matters. In the first instance, to permit the courts to write insurance policies would, in my opinion, lead to interminable confusion and great lack of uniformity. Such procedure would lead to the approval of one form of policy for one company, and approval of another and different form for another company.
Opinion delivered October 3, 1961.