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190 F.2d 605

Docket No. 10774.

Camp v. Herzog

District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals

Argued March 16, 1951.

Decided April 26, 1951.

District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals · decided 1951-04-26

2 counsel of record

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

““We agree with the court below that this suit must fail. Whether the Board inherently possesses the requisite authority to discipline those who practice before it or possesses such authority as a necessary incident to the powers conferred upon it by its governing statute is a question which should be answered by the Board in the first instance. If given such an opportunity, it may resolve this as well as the other procedural issues in appellant’s favor. And even if they should be decided against him, the Board may conclude on the merits to take no disciplinary action. In either event, judicial relief may ultimately prove unnecessary. We do not think that, under the circumstances of this case, the nature of the injury alleged by appellant warrants relaxation of the rule that administrative remedies must be exhausted before judicial relief may be sought.””

quoted by 1 later decision, including McDevitt v. Gunn

Applies 5 U.S.C. § 1009

Relies on Myers v. Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp. · Aircraft & Diesel Equipment Corp. v. Hirsch · Macauley v. Waterman Steamship Corp.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1951-04-26

How this case has been cited

Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently May 1976

7 federal appellate · 5 state decisions

100195119601970decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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¶1Charles Edward Rhetts, Washington, D. C., for appellant.

¶2A. Norman Somers, Asst. General Counsel, National Labor Relations Board, Washington, D. C., with whom William R. Con-sedine, Associate Solicitor, National Labor Relations Board, Washington, D. C., was on the brief, for appellees.

¶3Before PRETTYMAN, BAZELON, and WASHINGTON, Circuit Judges.

¶4BAZELON, Circuit Judge.

¶5Appellant, a member of the bar of Texas, seeks to enjoin appellees, members of the National Labor Relations Board, from proceeding with a hearing to determine whether disbarment or “other appropriate disciplinary action” should be taken against him. The Board hearing grew out of a charge by its General Counsel that appellant, while appearing as counsel in a proceeding before a trial examiner of the Board, committed an unprovoked physical assault of an aggravated character upon a Board attorney. In seeking judicial intervention to forestall the hearing, appellant alleges that the Board is not authorized, either expressly or impliedly, to conduct disciplinary proceedings against him, and that even if it did possess some such inherent power, it has not exercised that power in the manner required by § 3(a) of the Administrative Procedure Act.1 Thus, *606he rests his claim for relief not only upon general principles of equity hut also upon the ground that under § 10(c) of the Administrative Procedure Act,2 appellees’ repeated refusals to discontinue the disciplinary proceeding constitute illegal “final agency action” which will result in irreparable damage for which he has no other adequate remedy.

¶6We agree with the court below that this suit must fail. Whether the Board inherently possesses the requisite authority to discipline those who practice before it or possesses such authority as a necessary incident to the powers conferred upon it by its governing statute is a question which should be answered by the Board in the first instance. If given such an opportunity, it may resolve this as well as the other procedural issues in appellant’s favor. And even if they should be decided against him, the Board may conclude on the merits to take no disciplinary action. In either event, judicial relief may ultimately prove unnecessary. We do not think that, under the circumstances of this case, the nature of the injury alleged by appellant warrants relaxation of the rule that administrative remedies must be exhausted before judicial relief may be sought.3

¶7Affirmed.

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