Opinion ID: 177675
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The reasonable basis test is appropriate for deceptive advertising claims.

Text: The Defendants challenge both the legal and factual bases for the district court's grant of summary judgment. We begin by teasing out the applicable law. Our starting point is the FTC statute, which provides that both unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce (15 U.S.C. § 45(a)(1)) and disseminat[ing], or caus[ing] to be disseminated, any false advertisement ... in or having an effect upon commerce (15 U.S.C. § 52(a)) are unlawful. 15 U.S.C. § 55 defines the term false advertisement as an advertisement, other than labeling, which is misleading in a material respect.... Given the strong similarity between the terms deceptive and misleading, it is no surprise that sections 45 and 52 are sometimes applied in tandem as the basis for an FTC action against an alleged false advertiser; indeed, such a tandem reading is expressly allowed by 15 U.S.C. § 52(b). When the FTC brings an action based on the theory that advertising is deceptive because the advertisers lacked a reasonable basis for their claims, the FTC must: (1) demonstrate what evidence would in fact establish such a claim in the relevant scientific community; and (2) compare[] the advertisers' substantiation evidence to that required by the scientific community to see if the claims have been established. Removatron Intern. Corp. v. FTC, 884 F.2d 1489, 1498 (1st Cir.1989) (applying to administrative determination of deceptive advertising); see also FTC v. Garvey, 383 F.3d 891, 901 (9th Cir.2004) (applying the same test to claims by FTC in court). Where the advertisers lack adequate substantiation evidence, they necessarily lack any reasonable basis for their claims. See Removatron, 884 F.2d at 1498. And where the advertisers so lack a reasonable basis, their ads are deceptive as a matter of law. Id. The Defendants argue that there is a third prong to a deceptive advertising claim, asserting that the FTC was required and failedto prove that the infomercials were actually false. However, that argument is at odds with the cases cited above. Indeed, the Defendants cannot point to any source adequate to disrupt the FTC's and district court's firm grounding in case law. [6] Instead, the Defendants cite haphazardly to a federal statute (the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, Pub.L. No. 103-417, 108 Stat. 4325), whose legal relevance (if any) the Defendants never explain, and to a smattering of First Amendment case law, without engaging in any application of those sources or attempting to produce so much as a rough sketch of a rule that might support their proposition. We can make neither heads nor tails of these citations, which have no clear relevance and which are completely devoid of context or developed argument. We therefore hold that the Defendants have waived any argument they might have raised under those sources, if any exists. See, e.g., United States v. Zannino, 895 F.2d 1, 17 (1st Cir.1990) ([I]ssues adverted to in a perfunctory manner, unaccompanied by some effort at developed argumentation, are deemed waived.). In light of the Defendants' failure to raise any principled objection to the reasonable basis framework, which was carefully applied by the district court, the remainder of our analysis will follow that framework.