The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Friday ...
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Friday sided with the FCC, upholding the agency’s dismissal of a private land mobile radio station license despite objections that the order violated the Administrative Procedure Act. In 1991,…
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the FCC granted licenses to Francisco Padilla and Vince Cordaro, who assigned them to James Kay. When Padilla and Cordaro failed to apply for license renewals, the commission dismissed Kay’s assignment applications because an expired license can’t be assigned. Kay sought judicial review. “There is no unfairness” since a potential assignee may “demand, as a condition of the assignment contract, that the potential assignor (the license holder) seek a timely renewal from the Commission,” the court found. “That is what Kay should have done here; his quarrel is properly with Padilla and Cordaro, not the Commission.” A wireless industry attorney called the case relatively insignificant: “The economic value of the license isn’t very significant… It’s a narrow principle of administrative law and the tip off to that is that the whole opinion is four pages.”