Section 1808

Citation: Section 1808
Parent Document: McHugh v. Santa Monica Rent Control Board, 777 P.2d 91 (1989)
Jurisdiction: California (state)
Effective Date: 1989-08-17
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1156663/mchugh-v-santa-monica-rent-cont... ↗

Full Text

1,882 chars

In subsequent professional license revocation cases we rejected other “judicial power” challenges to administrative action. In so doing, we implied that so long as appropriate judicial review was available, the challenged administrative determination was not subject to attack on the ground of unlawful delegation of judicial power. (See, e.g., Drummey, supra, 13 Cal.2d 75, 84-85 [“It is the essence of judicial action that finality is given to findings based on conflicting evidence. If the statute be so construed it would violate the state Constitution. . . . [¶] In view of these principles, it necessarily follows that the court . . . must exercise an independent judgment on the facts.”]; Laisne, supra, 19 Cal.2d 831, 840 [“[A vested property right] cannot be finally destroyed by a nonjudicial body if the action of that body is questioned in a court of law in a mandate proceeding. [¶] [I]f finality were given to the action of an administrative agency, such would be an unconstitutional exercise of judicial power.”]; see also Bixby, supra, 4 Cal.3d 130, 142-143.) These decisions recognized—as a limiting condition on administrative power—what Professor Davis has later termed the “principle of check”: “In the organic arrangements that we have been making in recent decades in the establishment and control of administrative agencies, the principle that has guided us is the principle of check, not the principle of separation of powers. We have had little or no concern *362for avoiding a mixture of three or more kinds of power in the same agency; we have had much more concern for avoiding or minimizing unchecked power. The very identifying badge of the modern administrative agency has been the combination of judicial power (adjudication) with legislative power (rule making). . . .” (1 Davis, Administrative Law Treatise (1958) § 1.09, pp. 68-69, italics added.)

Other Sections in This Document (387)

Full Text