This is one of a series of posts on the Fifth Circuit's recent "private nondelegation case", National Horsemen's Benevolent & Protective Ass'n v. Black, where it struck down the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act for delegating power to a private organization, the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority. In Monday's post, I explained how A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), the main case that proponents of a "private nondelegation doctrine" usually rely on, gives no support to any view that delegations are judged more harshly if the recipient of the delegation is private instead of public. And in Tuesday's post, I talked about how the Supreme Court upheld private delegations four times between 1905 and 1939, and cited two of those cases in Schechter Poultry as examples of cases where private delegation was unproblematic; unfortunately it mischaracterized Schechter Poultry a few times in the 1940s as being about private delegation, but fortunately that was dictum.
Today, I'll talk about the second case that people often rely on when they want to argue that there's a rule against private delegations: Carter v. Carter Coal Co. (1936). Just like Schechter Poultry, this case has been widely misunderstood: (1) if you read it as an Article I Nondelegation Doctrine case, it doesn't support any special rule against private delegations; (2) it's probably best read as a Due Process case (based on the presence of financial bias); (3) if you read it as a Due Process case, it likewise doesn't support any special rule against private delegations.
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