Talsky

The Public Utilities Commission on June 4, 1958, instituted an investigation on its own motion into the operations and practices of Babe Talsky doing business as Beliable Delivery Service. The business was operated as a sole proprietorship from 1936 to August 1959, when it was incorporated as Beliable Delivery Service, Inc., with Talsky as the sole stockholder. Following hearings in 1958 and 1959, the commission on October 6, 1959, entered its order directing Talsky and the corporation to cease and desist from operating as a highway common carrier between a large number of designated cities unless and until they obtained a certificate of public convenience and necessity authorizing such operations. The order also suspended for 20 days their permits to operate as a radial highway common carrier and as a highway contract carrier.

In the present proceeding Talsky and the corporation challenge the jurisdiction of the commission to curtail their operations. The controversy centers upon the sufficiency of the evidence to support the commission’s order.

Talsky commenced trucking operations in January 1936, when he obtained a highway contract carrier permit. In April 1944, he obtained a…

I dissent. The statute here involved is too uncertain and indefinite to warrant the imposition of the penalty imposed by respondents on petitioners.

The rule is well stated by Mr. Justice Traynor in Perez v. Sharp, 32 Cal.2d 711 [ 198 P.2d 17 ], which held unconstitutional a statute declaring void marriages between white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes. He said at page 730: “To determine that a person is a Mongolian or Malayan within the meaning of the statute because of any trace of such ancestry, however slight, would be absurd. If the classification of a person of mixed ancestry depends upon a given proportion of Mongolians or Malayans among his ancestors, how can this court, without clearly invading the province of the Legislature, determine what that decisive proportion is? [Citation.] Nor can this court assume that a predominance in number of ancestors of one race makes a person a Caucasian, Mongolian, or Malayan within the meaning of the statute, for absurd results would follow from such an assumption. Thus, a person with three-sixteenths Malay ancestry might have many so-called Malay characteristics and yet be considered a white…