Prof. Lazaroff Sees O'Bannon Decision as Casualty of Smaller Court

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would not review the case of O’Bannon v. NCAA antitrust case. The decision lets stand a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the NCAA is subject to antitrust scrutiny but that schools are not required to compensate student athletes with money “untethered to educational purposes.”

Professor Emeritus Dan Lazaroff, former director of the Sports Law Institute at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, is available for commentary. Of the decision, the antitrust expert says:

“This is not a surprising result, given the fact that other antitrust cases against the NCAA are pending in the Ninth and other federal circuits. Some of the ongoing litigation sweeps more broadly than O'Bannon, so it makes sense for the court to consider these issues down the road with a more complete picture of where the lower federal courts stand. The court likes to take up cases when there is a conflict in the circuits, so waiting increases the likelihood of that. Being down one justice might have been a factor. My sense is that any vote by the eight could easily break down 4 -4, and that would make for a big waste of everybody's time.”

Apple Loses Appeal in E-Books Antitrust Case

By Professor Jeffery Atik

This is an excerpt from Attraverso

Through a series of spectacular commercial moves, Apple succeeded in disrupting the e-book space upon its 2009 release of the iPad, sweeping away Amazon Kindle’s popular $9.99 pricing for new releases and for New York Times best-sellers. The iPad brought meaningful competition to Amazon’s wildly successful Kindle as an e-book platform; the emergence of this new distribution channel raised e-book prices, whether purchased on iPads or Kindles, seemingly defying an economic law of gravity. It was a coup that only a Steve Jobs could pull off. The e-book price shift attracted the attention of federal and state antitrust authorities. In 2012, the government brought a civil antitrust action against Apple and five major publishers. The book publishers settled, and the government proceeded in a price fixing claim against Apple. On June 30, a panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a federal trial court’s finding that Apple violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

Apple’s play in resetting the commercial terms of e-book distribution was brilliant, even if (as the courts have now determined) illegal. The Apple e-book case addresses some major issues in contemporary antitrust law. May a party, in a vertical relationship with a producers cartel, be found liable for price fixing? Does such a situation constitute a per se antitrust offense?

Read the full post on Attraverso