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Page Number: 13.0

8 

NORTH CAROLINA STATE BD. OF DENTAL
EXAMINERS v. FTC 
Opinion of the Court 

Parker’s  rationale  to  ensure  the  States  accept  political 
accountability for anticompetitive conduct they permit and 
control.  See Ticor, 504 U. S., at 636. 

Limits  on  state-action  immunity  are  most  essential
when  the  State  seeks  to  delegate  its  regulatory  power  to
active  market  participants,  for  established  ethical  stand­
ards may blend with private anticompetitive motives in a
way difficult even for market participants to discern.  Dual 
allegiances are not always apparent to an actor.  In conse­
quence,  active  market  participants  cannot  be  allowed  to
regulate  their  own  markets  free  from  antitrust  account­
ability.  See Midcal, supra, at 106 (“The national policy in
favor  of  competition  cannot  be  thwarted  by  casting  [a] 
gauzy cloak of state involvement over what is essentially a 
private  price-fixing  arrangement”).    Indeed,  prohibitions
against  anticompetitive  self-regulation  by  active  market
participants are an axiom of federal antitrust policy.  See, 
e.g., Allied Tube & Conduit Corp. v. Indian Head, Inc., 486 
U. S.  492,  501  (1988);  Hoover,  supra,  at  584  (Stevens,  J.,
dissenting)  (“The  risk  that  private  regulation  of  market
entry, prices, or output may be designed to confer monop­
oly profits on members of an industry at the expense of the 
consuming  public  has  been  the  central  concern  of  . . .  our 
antitrust  jurisprudence”);  see  also  Elhauge,  The  Scope  of 
Antitrust Process, 104 Harv. L. Rev. 667, 672 (1991).  So it 
follows that, under Parker and the Supremacy Clause, the
States’ greater power to attain an end does not include the 
lesser power to negate the congressional judgment embod­
ied in the Sherman Act through unsupervised delegations
to active market participants.  See Garland, Antitrust and 
State  Action:  Economic  Efficiency  and  the  Political  Pro­
cess, 96 Yale L. J. 486, 500 (1986). 

Parker  immunity  requires  that  the  anticompetitive 

conduct  of  nonsovereign  actors,  especially  those  author­
ized  by  the  State  to  regulate  their  own  profession,  result 
from  procedures  that  suffice  to  make  it  the  State’s  own.