Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Jurisdiction Beyond Our Borders: United States V. Alcoa And The Extraterritorial Reach Of American Antitrust, 1909–1945, Laura Phillips Sawyer

Scholarly Works

Chapter in the book Antimonopoly and American Democracy by Daniel A. Crane and William J. Novak, eds., Oxford University Press, 2023.

In 1945, Judge Learned Hand wrote one of the most influential opinions in modern antitrust law. In declaring that the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) had illegally monopolized the industry for virgin aluminum and had participated in an illegal international cartel, Hand both revived and extended American antitrust law. The ruling is famous for several reasons: it narrowly defined the relevant market in favor of the government; it expanded the category of impermissible dominant firm conduct; it interpreted congressional …

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 …