Interstate Commerce Commission
Scarborough, Cathy. 1989. “Conceptualizing Black Women’s
Employment Experiences.” Yale Law Journal 98: 1457–1478.
Smith, Peggie R. 1991. “Separate Identities: Black Women,
Work, and Title VII.” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 14: 21–
71.
Spelman, Elizabeth.1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Theory. Boston: Beacon Press.
Truth, Sojourner. 1972. “Ain’t I a Woman.” In Feminisim: The
Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir. New York:
Vintage Books.
Valdes, Francisco. 1995. “Queers, Sissies, Dykes, and Tomboys:
Deconstructing the Conflation of ‘Sex,’ ‘Gender,’ and ‘Sexual
Orientation’ in Euro-American Law and Society.” California
Law Review 83: 1–377.
Weatherspoon, Floyd D. 1996. “Remedying Employment
Discrimination against African-American Males: Stereotypical
Biases Engender a Case of Race Plus Sex Discrimination.”
Washburn Law Journal 36: 23–87.
Wei, Virginia W. 1996. “Asian Women and Employment
Discrimination: Using Intersectionality Theory to Address
Title VII Claims Based on Combined Factors of Race, Gender,
and National Origin.” Boston College Law Review 37: 771–
812.
Wing, Adrien K., ed. 2003. Critical Race Feminism: A Reader.
New York: New York University Press.
Wendy Scott
INTERSTATE COMMERCE
SEE
Article I; Commerce Clause; Dormant Commerce
Clause.
INTERSTATE COMMERCE
COMMISSION
The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was the
first independent regulatory agency in the United States.
The ICC was established in 1887 by the Interstate
Commerce Act, which was signed into law by President
Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) on February 4, 1887. The
ICC was created due to escalating public complaints in
the 1880s about deceitful railroad practices and unfair
rates. The commission’s initial purpose was to regulate
railroads in order to ensure fair rates, to eliminate rate
discrimination, and to regulate other aspects of common
carriers. The ICC was abolished in 1995 and all of the
agency’s remaining functions were transferred to the
Surface Transportation Board.
In 1880 the rail system consisted of 87,781.97 miles
of railroad covering the United States. A significant
problem at this time was that railroad rates were not
uniform. Adding to the rate differentiation was that in
some areas of the nation there was competition among
railroads, whereas in other regions there was a monopoly.
Monopolistic trusts were in control of huge sectors of the
national economy and many times these same empires,
which controlled agriculture and other industries, also
controlled the railroad because they were heavily reliant
on the rail system. In 1886 the Supreme Court ruled in
Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway v. Illinois, 118 U.S.
557 (1886) that states could not regulate interstate
railroads which, in turn, required the federal action that
lead to the ICC.
In the beginning the ICC consisted of five members,
but was intermittently increased over the years and
ultimately capped at eleven in 1920. Members served a
staggered six-year term and were appointed by the
president, with the consent of the Senate, but could not
be dismissed by the president. The ICC elected its own
chairperson, unlike most other regulatory agencies. For a
long time the ICC’s usefulness was limited by Congress’s
failure to give it enforcement power and by the vague
language of the Supreme Court’s interpretation of its
power. One such example is that the Interstate Commerce
Act contained penalties for violating its provisions, such as
having too high of rates, but the ICC was not given power
to enforce the sanctions.
When it first came into existence the ICC regulated
only railroads, but over the years the ICC came to regulate
all common carriers such as buses, trucks, barges, and
freight forwarders. Its main purpose was to guarantee that
rates were not used to stifle competition. The Hepburn
Act of 1906 gave the ICC the power to substitute existing
rates with what was deemed to be “just-and-reasonable
maximum rates” and the ICC orders were made binding
with obedience compelled by the courts. The ICC’s power
steadily increased over the years as the Supreme Court
expanded its ideas of what constituted interstate commerce, such as in Houston, East & West Texas Railway Co.
v. United States, 234 U.S. 342 (1914), also known as the
Shreveport Rate Case, in which the Court stated that even
matters that are strictly intrastate can have an effect on
interstate commerce and therefore can be federally
regulated. In the Minnesota Rate Cases, 230 U.S. 352
(1913), the Court expressly allowed the ICC to regulate
intrastate rates that discriminated against interstate
commerce. This decision gave the ICC power over the
conflicting laws and regulations of state commissions and
legislatures.
One significant milestone in the increase of ICC
power was the Transportation Act of 1920, in which the
government was returning railroads back to private
companies after World War I. The Transportation Act
gave the ICC the authority to set railroad rates instead of
merely approving them, as it had been doing. Over the
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Intimacy
years the ICC gained the power to manage labor disputes
in interstate commerce, decide suitable profit levels, and
organize mergers. The ICC also imposed the Supreme
Court mandated desegregation of train passenger cars.
Until the Federal Communications Commission was
created in 1934 the ICC regulated telegraph, telephone,
and cable communication. The regulatory powers of the
ICC were overtaken by the Department of Transportation in 1966. During the 1980s President Ronald Reagan
tried many times to abolish the ICC, claiming that
deregulation had made it unnecessary, but the proposals
were refused by Congress. The ICC’s power over rates
and routes in trucking and the railroad were curtailed in
1980 by the Staggers Rail Act and the Motor Carrier Act.
The agency’s control over interstate trucking ended in
1994. Due to the deregulation of many of the industries
that the ICC was once in charge of, the ICC was
terminated in 1995. The majority of the ICC’s remaining
roles were reassigned to the new National Surface
Transportation Board.
Commerce Clause; Judicial Review of Administrative Action; Railroads
SEE ALSO
Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494 [1977]), the right to marry
(Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 [1967]), the right to access
contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479
[1965], recognizing the right of married couples to access
contraceptives; Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 [1972],
recognizing the right of unmarried individuals to access
contraceptives; and Carey v. Population Services International, 431 U.S. 678 [1977], recognizing the right of
minors to access contraceptives), the right to choose and
obtain an abortion (Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 [1973],
recognizing a woman’s right to an abortion and Planned
Parenthood v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52 [1976], recognizing a
minor’s right to an abortion), and the right to engage in
private consensual sodomy (Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S.
558 [2003]). The criminalization of sodomy aside, the
Court’s protection of sexual freedom has been narrowly
construed and reflects a commitment to the traditional
family. It has explicitly refused to protect polygamous
relationships (Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145
[1879]) and has not yet consented to accept a case urging
extending constitutional protection to historically prohibited relationships, such as consensual incest, fornication,
adultery, or same-sex marriage.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DEFINING INTIMACY
Hoogenboom, Ari and Olive. 1976. A History of the ICC: From
Panacea to Palliative. New York: W. W. Norton.
The term intimacy can be defined broadly and subjectively.
A common household dictionary defines the term intimate
as characterized by a very close association or familiarity,
affording privacy and informality, or very personal. This
broad definition of intimacy is based on association and
emotion and could include a variety of relationships, such
as that between close friends or neighbors, business
partners, teachers and students, or others tied together
by geography, shared purpose and commitment, or
common interests.
Scholars have also acknowledged the broader manifestations of the concept of intimacy. A socio-psychology
text book would extend the definition of intimacy beyond
marriage to some relationships between friends and dating
couples because they can exhibit “behavioral interdependence, need fulfillment, and emotional attachment”
(Brehm 1992, p. 4).
Legal scholar Kenneth Karst emphasizes the relational
nature of intimacy in describing an “intimate association”
as “a close and familiar personal relationship with another”
and argues that such relationships can in some significant
ways be analogized to marriage and family relationships.
He also explicitly allows for the inclusion of friends in his
list of potential intimates. Karst suggests that intimate
associations could be distinguished from other social
interactions because intimacy “may take the form of living
in the same quarters, sexual intimacy, or blood ties, or a
formal relationship.” The key conceptual point is that
ultimately, an intimate association creates “a new being, a
Stone, Richard D. 1991. The Interstate Commerce Commission and
the Railroad Industry: A History of Regulatory Policy. New York:
Praeger.
Wendy Groce-Smith
INTIMACY
Human beings are social animals and intimate acts,
choices, and relationships are both desirable and inevitable
parts of our existence. All intimacies are not created equal,
however, and society and its institutions support and
facilitate the designation of only some relationships and
spaces as appropriately intimate. Such determinations
historically have been left primarily to local or state levels
of government. In recent decades, however, the U.S.
Supreme Court has actively addressed some aspects of
intimacy, disapproving of some state regulations, particularly in regard to family matters.
In the early twenty-first century, the forms of
intimacy that are clearly protected fall into either the
category of established family relationships, particularly
marriage, or relate to sexual freedom, most clearly the
right to be free to reject the intimacy imposed by
reproduction. The Supreme Court has protected the right
of family members to live together (Moore v. City of East
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