American Fruit Growers v. Parker

California Supreme Court Jul 14, 1943 No. L. A. 17735Published

Before: Edmonds

AI Brief

AI-generated · verify before citing

Holding. The court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the validity of a license regulating multiple agricultural products because the regulation of the specific product they contested had been terminated, rendering them immune from injury.

Issues

Whether the inclusion of both oranges and grapefruit under a single marketing license constitutes the regulation of separate and distinct agricultural industries.
Whether a party may challenge the validity of a regulation when they are no longer subject to injury by its operation.

Disposition. reversed

Quotations verified verbatim against the opinion

“a court will not pass upon the validity of a statute or order upon the complaint of one who will not be injured by its operation”

“Relief by injunction operates in futuro, and the right to it must be determined as of the date of decision by an appellate court.”

[514]

EDMONDS, J.

A number of corporations and cooperative marketing associations engaged in growing oranges and marketing them in intrastate commerce joined American Fruit Growers, Inc. as plaintiffs in this proceeding, which challenges the validity of the license considered in

People

Western Fruit Growers, Inc. (ante,

p. 494 [140 P.2d 13]). The Director of Agriculture and persons connected with him in administering the statutes construed in that case are the defendants. Upon a hearing, the superior court issued a preliminary injunction restraining the enforcement of the regulations established by the license. The appeal is from that order.

The decision in the companion case has disposed of all but one of the questions which are presented in this proceeding. Here the growers and distributors who are the respondents make the additional claim that the license was invalid from its inception because it covered the regulation of both oranges and grapefruit. The production and marketing of each of these products, they assert, is a separate and distinct agricultural industry.

This point was also urged in

Brock

Superior Court,

12 Cal.2d 605 [86 P.2d 805], which was a proceeding brought by the growers and handlers of desert grapefruit to enjoin the enforcement of the same license against them. The court then decided that the allegations of the complaint tendered an issue of fact as to whether the marketing of desert grapefruit is an agricultural trade or industry distinctly different from the distribution of other products, and,, also, whether the producers of grapefruit were being discriminated against to the profit and advantage of the orange growers. The plaintiffs, said the court, were entitled to findings upon those issues and it therefore denied the petition of the Director of Agriculture for a writ of prohibition compelling the respondent superior court to dissolve a temporary injunction which it had issued enjoining the enforcement of the provisions of License No. 2 as to grapefruit.

American Fruit Growers v. Parker

AI Brief

EDMONDS, J.

More from California Supreme Court

Related research

AI Brief