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The Summary Judgment Revolution That Wasn't, Jonathan R. Nash, D. Daniel Sokol

Faculty Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court decided a trilogy of cases on summary judgment in 1986. Questions remain as to how much effect these cases have had on judicial decision-making in terms of wins and losses for plaintiffs. Shifts in wins, losses, and what cases get to decisions on the merits impact access to justice. We assemble novel datasets to examine this question empirically in three areas of law that are more likely to respond to shifts in the standard for summary judgment: antitrust, securities regulation, and civil rights. We find that the Supreme Court’s decisions had a statistically significant effect in …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents.

Antitrust Changeup: How A Single Antitrust Reform Could Be A Home Run For Minor League Baseball Players, Jeremy Ulm

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act to protect competition in the marketplace. Federal antitrust law has developed to prevent businesses from exerting unfair power on their employees and customers. Specifically, the Sherman Act prevents competitors from reaching unreasonable agreements amongst themselves and from monopolizing markets. However, not all industries have these protections.

Historically, federal antitrust law has not governed the “Business of Baseball.” The Supreme Court had the opportunity to apply antitrust law to baseball in Federal Baseball Club, Incorporated v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs; however, the Court held that the Business of Baseball was not …

Antitrust's "Jurisdictional" Reach Abroad, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In its Arbaugh decision the Supreme Court insisted that a federal statute’s limitation on reach be regarded as “jurisdictional” only if the legislature was clear that this is what it had in mind. The Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvement Act (FTAIA) presents a puzzle in this regard, because Congress seems to have been quite clear about what it had in mind; it simply failed to use the correct set of buzzwords in the statute itself, and well before Arbaugh assessed this requirement.

Even if the FTAIA is to be regarded as non-jurisdictional, the constitutional extraterritorial reach of the Sherman Act is …

The Pleading Problem In Antitrust Cases And Beyond, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In its Twombly decision the Supreme Court held that an antitrust complaint failed because its allegations did not include enough “factual matter” to justify proceeding to discovery. Two years later the Court extended this new pleading standard to federal complaints generally. Twombly’s broad language has led to a broad rewriting of federal pleading doctrine.

Naked market division conspiracies such as the one pled in Twombly must be kept secret because antitrust enforcers will prosecute them when they are detected. This inherent secrecy, which the Supreme Court did not discuss, has dire consequences for pleading if too much factual specificity …