is here, over at eCCP, and differs somewhat from Thom’s.
The takeway excerpt is:
Credit Suisse has important implications for antitrust practice. The decision’s effect is to narrow the scope of antitrust law and to invite efforts by regulated industries to narrow it still further. The court’s “clearly incompatible†standard is new and (though it purports not to) seems to water down considerably the old “plain repugnancy†test of Gordon v. New York Stock Exchange, Inc. 422 U.S. 659, 682 (1975). Under the new incompatibility standard, there no longer has to be an actual conflict between antitrust and other federal law for antitrust implicitly not to apply. Even a mere regulatory overlap may now be sufficient to trigger antitrust immunity. (Recall that in Credit Suisse the Court assumed that both antitrust and the SEC disapproved of the tying and other practices in question, and yet the Court still considered the two bodies of law incompatible on account of the regulatory overlap.) ….
Going forward, the Court will need to tighten the rule in Credit Suisse if it wants antitrust to continue to operate as Congress intended it to in conjunction with the compartmentalized maze of federal regulatory law. No one thinks that securities firms should be exempt from the legal obligations that generally flow from non-securities law (antitrust aside). If we expect to hold securities and other regulated firms accountable for torts and breaches of contract, or for crimes and discrimination, then why not also hold them accountable for antitrust violations? If Congress says otherwise, that is one thing. But if Congress is silent on the question, a federal agency should not have have any more power than a state to confer antitrust immunity upon those that it regulates. Of states we require a clearly articulated policy that presents an actual conflict, not merely the possibility of future potential incompatibility. From federal agencies we should not expect any less.
Just yesterday, in its historic decision in Leegin, the Court strongly reaffirmed its confidence in the Rule of Reason’s workability by overturning Dr. Miles and extending the rule’s reach to vertical RPM. That workability should make us equally confident that antitrust can peacefully coexist with the reguatory state.
