My Take on American Needle v. NFL Supreme Court Opinion
Today the United States Supreme Court released its opinion in the antitrust case American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League. The question was whether or not the NFL could be held accountable under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which regulates agreements that restrain trade. SCOTUS decided that the NFL, despite having formed a tidy single legal entity back in 1963 to handle all the teams’ licensing needs (National Football League Properties) , was not acting as a single entity and therefore could be held to account for restraining trade under Section 1. The holding invalidates Judge Easterbrook’s 7th Circuit opinion in Chicago Prof’l Sports v. NBA that treated a sports league as a single entity for antitrust purposes, the case on which the 7th Circuit relied, in part, for its affirmation of summary judgment in the NFL’s favor.
This opinion:
- Reaffirms my ♥ for Justice Stevens.
- Reads like a mini-treatise on how and why the court got to where it is today in this function-over-form assessment of combinations that might restrain trade.
- Severely overuses the phrase “independent centers of decisionmaking.”
- Is a reminder that the new administration’s antitrust machine is rolling right along (see the amicus brief for this case here).
- Makes me grateful for having learned antitrust from Herbert Hovenkamp.
Cases like this — that concretely connect something I’ve recently studied in law school to the popular real work — fully activate my dormant lawgeek, and make me glad I’ve committed to learning and studying law.