Thomas M. Cooley and the Interstate Commerce Commission: Continuity and Change in the Doctrine of Equal Rights
<j Thomas M. Cooley, a man whose 1887 appointment to the Interstate Commerce Commission gave dignity and distinction to the inception of federal regulatory action, has been misunderstood by commentators to the neglect of important themes in nineteenth-century American history. Misjudged as a single-minded advocate of the judicial protection of property rights, Cooley, in reality, was a complicated individual who approached the administrative task of implementing the Interstate Commerce Act with values and beliefs which had their source in the Jacksonian persuasion of the first three decades of his life.' The democratic attitudes