e abruptly rejected by the Court in Ohio
Valley Water Company _v._ Ben Avon Borough,[211] decided in 1920, as
being no longer sufficient to satisfy the requirements of due process.
Unlike previous litigation involving allegedly confiscatory rate orders
of State commissions, which had developed from rulings of lower federal
courts in injunctive proceedings, this case reached the Supreme Court by
way of appeal from a State appellate tribunal;[212] and although the
latter did in fact review the evidence and ascertained that the State
commission's findings of fact were supported by substantial evidence, it
also construed the statute providing for review as denying to State
courts "the power to pass upon the weight of such evidence." Largely on
the strength of this interpretation of the applicable State statute, the
Supreme Court held that when the order of a legislature, or of a
commission, prescribing a schedule of maximum future rates is challenged
as confiscatory, "the State must provide a fair opportunity for
submitting that issue to a judicial tribunal for determination upon its
own independent judgment as to both law and facts; otherwise the order
is void because in conflict with the due process clause, Fourteenth
Amendment."

Without departing from the ruling, previously enunciated in Louisville
& N.R. Co. _v._ Garrett,[213] that the failure of a State to grant a
statutory right of judicial appeal from a commission's regulation is not
violative of due process as long as relief is obtainable by a bill in
equity for injunction, the Court also held that the alternative remedy
of injunction expressly provided by State law did not afford an adequate
opportunity for testing judicially a confiscatory rate order. It
conceded the principle stressed by the dissenting Justices that "where a
State offers a litigant the choice of two methods of judicial review, of
which one is both appropriate and unrestricted, the mere fact that the
other which the litigant elects is limited, does not amount to a denial
of the constitutional right to a judicial review."[214]

History of the Valuation Question

For almost fifty years the Court was to wander through a maze of
conflicting formulas for valuing public service corporation property
only to emerge therefrom in 1944 at a point not very far removed from
Munn _v._ Illinois.[215] By holding, in 1942, in Federal Power
Commission _v._ Natural Gas Pipeline Co.,[216] that the "Constitution