Law Commons^™

The Demise Of The Intra-Enterprise Conspiracy Doctine: Flexible Antitrust Enforcement Policy Abandoned In A Maze Of Economic Certainty—Copperweld Corp. V. Independence Tube Corp., 104 S. Ct. 2731 (1984), S. John Goodwin

Washington Law Review

In Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp. the United States Supreme Court held that corporations and their wholly owned subsidiaries cannot conspire and, thus, cannot violate section 1 of the Sherman Act. The decision signals an important shift in interpretation of the Sherman Act. Before Copperweld, corporations and their wholly owned subsidiaries were subject to conspiratorial liability under the Act. The Supreme Court had recognized intra-enterprise conspiracies on at least six occasions. Despite their diverging views on how broadly the doctrine was to be interpreted, the federal courts of appeals had unanimously applied the doctrine. The Court implicitly addressed the …