62 RUTLEDGE, J., dissenting. Republic's gathering system which runs across the Peerless land, no market outlet that would take sufficient gas to justify production of the Peerless well is close enough to make it financially practical for Peerless to construct its own pipe line. It is undisputed that the only feasible method of producing the well is to require Republic to take Peerless gas into its gathering system.* For this reason Peerless applied to the Oklahoma Corporate Commission for an order compelling Republic to connect its pipe line to the Peerless well and to purchase gas from Peerless at a price to be fixed by the commission. After hearing, the commission concluded that the applicable Oklahoma statutes required it to enforce ratable taking and ratable production of gas as between Republic and Peerless. The commission recognized alternative methods of protecting Peerless from loss due to drainage, first by ordering gas in said field unless required to take ratably from said well of Peerless.... "(e) Republic . . . is draining gas from underneath said Section 14 into which said Peerless Oil and Gas Company's well has been drilled, and will continue to drain gas from underneath said Section 14 until all the gas thereunder has been drained and Peerless . . . will be prevented from taking its proportionate share of the natural gas in the field unless Republic . . . is required to take gas ratably from [Peerless]." The Report of the commission states: "It is evident from all the facts and circumstances in this case that if the Peerless Company is to be allowed to produce gas from its well, this gas must be by it transported fifteen to thirty miles, unless said gas is transported or disposed of by the Republic Natural Gas Company. "It would be impractical from a financial standpoint to construct a pipeline to any city or other market outlet that would take sufficient gas to justify the production of this well; and it would be impossible to economically operate the well under present conditions existing in that field unless the gas is taken into the pipeline of the Republic Natural Gas Company." 5 Okla. Stat., tit. 52, §§ 232, 233, 239, 240, 243. RUTLEDGE, J., dissenting. 334 U.S. all wells in the area to shut down completely, and second by ordering Republic to purchase from Peerless. Since the first method was considered harsh, the second was preferred. Accordingly the commission issued an order requiring Republic to take gas ratably from the Peerless well as soon as the necessary connection could be made, allowing it, however, the alternative of closing down all of its wells in the Oklahoma portion of the field if it preferred this to taking the Peerless gas. The terms and conditions of the taking were to be determined by the parties; but, in the event of failure to agree, they were “granted the right to make further application to the Commission for an order fixing such terms and conditions . . The taking, however, was not to await this agreement or further order; it was to begin at once.' 996 The order required Republic "1. . . . to take gas ratably from [Peerless] and to make necessary connection as soon as applicant lays a line connecting said well with respondent's line, and to continue to do so until the further order of this Commission; provided that, applicant shall lay its line from its well to the lines of respondent at some point designated by the respondent, but in said Section 14 in which said well of Peerless . . . has been drilled; and said respondent is required to make said designation immediately and without unreasonable delay, and in event of failure of respondent so to do, respondent shall no longer be permitted to produce any of its wells located in the Hugoton Oklahoma Gas Field. [Emphasis added.] "2. The terms and conditions of such taking of natural gas by [Republic] from [Peerless] shall be determined and agreed upon by and between applicant and respondent; and in the event said parties are unable to agree, applicant and respondent are hereby granted the right to make further application to the Commission for an order fixing such terms and conditions; and the Commission retains jurisdiction hereof for said purpose." 'See note 6. The order's language leaves no room for the inference, which appears to be injected here, that the taking was not required to begin until the terms had been agreed upon or determined by further order. 62 RUTLEDGE, J., dissenting. Affirming the order, the Supreme Court of Oklahoma construed the state statutes to authorize the administrative action. 198 Okla. 350. The case thus presents on the merits the question whether a state, as a means of adjusting private correlative rights in a common reservoir, has the power in such circumstances as these to compel one private producer to share his market with another, when otherwise his production would drain off that other's ratable share of the gas in place and thus appropriate it to himself. I. The majority consider that the proceedings in the state tribunals have not terminated in a final judgment from which appeal to this Court lies, and therefore refuse to adjudicate this question. In the strictest sense the state proceedings will not be completed until the parties have agreed upon the terms and conditions of Republic's taking of gas from Peerless or, if they do not agree, until the commission has issued an additional order fixing those terms. Since it is not certain that the parties will agree, the possibility remains that a further order may be required before all phases of the controversy are disposed of. It is this possibility, as I think a remote one, which furnishes one of the grounds for concluding that the Oklahoma court's judgment is not final within the meaning and policy of § 237. The fact that all phases of the litigation are not concluded does not necessarily defeat our jurisdiction. This is true, although as recently as Gospel Army v. Los Angeles, 331 U. S. 543, we reiterated that, for a judgment to be final and reviewable under § 237, "it must end the litigation by fully determining the rights of the parties, so that nothing remains to be done by the trial court 'except the ministerial act of entering the judgment which the RUTLEDGE, J., dissenting. 8 334 U.S. appellate court . . . directed.'" 331 U. S. at 546. This is the general rule, grounded in a variety of considerations reflected in the statutory command and coming down to the sum that, in exercising the jurisdiction conferred by § 237, this Court is not to be concerned with reviewing inconclusive, piecemeal, or repetitious determinations. The Gospel Army case represents a typical instance for applying the terms and the policy of § 237.9 But not every decision by a state court of last resort leaving the controversy open to further proceedings and orders is either inconclusive of the issues or premature for purposes of review under § 237. This appears most recently from the decision in Radio Station WOW v. Johnson, 326 U. S. 120, which applied a settled line of authorities to that effect. Cf. Richfield Oil Corp. v. State Board, 329 U. S. 69. In such cases the formulation of the test of finality made in the Gospel Army and like decisions has not been followed. Instead that question, in the special circumstances, has been treated as posing essentially a practical problem, not one to be determined either by the label. attached to the state court judgment by local law, Richfield Oil Corp. v. State Board, supra, or by the merely mechanical inquiry whether some further order or proceeding beyond "the ministerial act of entering the judgment" may be had or necessary after our decision is rendered. Radio Station WOW v. Johnson, supra at 125. The WOW opinion noted that the typical case for applying the broader, less mechanical approach to the 8 Some of the considerations are enumerated in Radio Station WOW v. Johnson, 326 U. S. 120, 123–124. Under California procedure the state supreme court's unqualified order for reversal was "effective to remand the case 'for a new trial and [place] the parties in the same position as if the case had never been tried.'" 331 U. S. at 546 and authorities cited. The effect was thus to leave all issues inconclusively determined pending further proceedings in the trial court. 62 RUTLEDGE, J., dissenting. question of finality had involved judgments directing the immediate delivery of property, to be followed by an accounting decreed in the same order. It stated, with reference to these and like situations: "In effect, such a controversy is a multiple litigation allowing review of the adjudication which is concluded because it is independent of, and unaffected by, another litigation with which it happens to be entangled." 326 U. S. at 126. Accordingly, since the two phases of the controversy were separate and distinct, we exercised our jurisdiction to determine the federal questions involved in the phase concluded by the state court's decision. This was done, although the judgment required further and possibly extensive judicial proceedings before the other and separable phase of the accounting could reach a final determination.10 Those further proceedings involved very much more than "ministerial acts"; indeed the determination of a complicated accounting requires the highest order of judicial discretion. Notwithstanding this and despite the want of strict finality, jurisdiction was sustained because a number of factors were felt to require that action in order to give effect to the policy of § 237 providing for review, rather than to a merely mechanical application of its terms for denying review. There was nothing tentative or inconclusive about the Nebraska court's judgment for immediate delivery of the property. Nor was it necessary to execution of that phase of the judgment to have contemporaneous conclu 10 The two prior decisions deemed decisive against mechanical determination of finality in such situations were Forgay v. Conrad, 6 How. 201, and Carondelet Canal Co. v. Louisiana, 233 U. S. 362, the former of which we noted had "stood on our books for nearly a hundred years in an opinion carrying the authority, especially weighty in such matters, of Chief Justice Taney." 326 U. S. 120, |