Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the freshman Republican and Tea Party favorite, is only slightly more famous as the son of Representative Ron Paul than as the deliberate namesake of Ayn Rand. Last Thursday he introduced a genuine humdinger. Deploying that prowess for economic and legal analysis that may characterize many ophthalmologists, Senator Paul seems…
The next Term may see significant SCOTUS consideration of the state action immunity, the first such case since 1992. The decision below in the defendants’ favor was quite plainly wrong, and so it might also become only the second antitrust case in twenty years in which the Court has ruled for a plaintiff. That would…
Federal legislative proposals that would have repealed the antitrust exemption enjoyed by freight railroads and would have permitted the U.S. Department of Justice to sue Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members for price fixing will not pass the Senate as part of the Surface Transportation Bill. Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin) last month introduced two…
The authors are, respectively, partner and associate, at the firm of Labaton Sucharow LLP, New York City. Mr. Himes, who also co-chairs the firm’s Antitrust Practice Group, is the former Antitrust Bureau Chief, Office of the Attorney General of New York. Firm attorneys are counsel for plaintiffs in the Potatoes case discussed in this paper….
Last week, the federal district court in Detroit denied Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan’s motion to dismiss a federal/state antitrust action challenging the health insurer’s use of most favored nation (MFN) clauses in its provider agreements with various hospitals. The suit, filed in October 2010, alleges that the MFN clauses unreasonably restrained trade in…
Earlier today, the U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis vacated an injunction lifting the National Football League’s “lockout” of its players. The divided appellate court, just five days after hearing oral argument on the matter, concluded that, because the parties were involved in a labor dispute, the Norris-LaGuardia Act prohibited the federal district court…
How far can a competitor go in an effort to convince a local government to block a potential rival from setting up shop in its area without running afoul of the antitrust laws? Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled that a hospital was shielded from antitrust liability for allegedly making misrepresentations…
Some commentators are pretty alarmed over the Federal Trade Commission’s ruling earlier this year denying antitrust immunity for a North Carolina regulatory board’s outlawry of teeth-whitening by non-dentists. What has some of them using words like “epic,” and what has the state regulator-defendant virtually threatening secession from the Union (just take a look at the…
