Opinion ID: 2778249
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Overview of the Clayton Act

Text: The great Yankee catcher Yogi Berra is reputed (likely apocryphally) to have said that it’s “tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The Perils of Prediction, Economist, June 2, 2007, at 96.7 Yet that is precisely what this case requires. Because § 7 of the Clayton Act bars mergers whose effect “may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly,” 15 U.S.C. § 18, judicial analysis necessarily focuses on “probabilities, not certainties,” Brown Shoe Co. v. United States, 370 U.S. 294, 323 (1962). This “requires not merely an appraisal of the immediate impact of the merger upon competition, but a prediction of its impact upon competitive conditions in the future; this is what is meant when it is said that the amended § 7 was intended to arrest anticompetitive tendencies in their incipiency.” United States v. Phila. Nat’l Bank, 374 U.S. 321, 362 (1963) (internal quotation marks omitted). Section 7 claims are typically assessed under a “burdenshifting framework.” Chi. Bridge & Iron Co. v. FTC, 534 F.3d 410, 423 (5th Cir. 2008). The plaintiff must first 7 This quotation is not included in the definitive book of Berra quotations, see Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book: “I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said!” (1998), and its provenance is at best unclear, see, e.g., The Yale Book of Quotations 92 (Fred R. Shapiro ed., 2006) (attributing a variant to Niels Bohr, but noting that the exact authorship is disputed). 12 ST. ALPHONSUS MED. CTR. V. ST. LUKE’S HEALTH SYS. establish a prima facie case that a merger is anticompetitive. See Olin Corp. v. FTC, 986 F.2d 1295, 1305 (9th Cir. 1993) (discussing how plaintiff’s establishment of a prima facie case on statistical evidence was the first step in the analysis). The burden then shifts to the defendant to rebut the prima facie case. See id.; Am. Stores, 872 F.2d at 842 (citing United States v. Marine Bancorporation, Inc., 418 U.S. 602, 631 (1974)). “[I]f the [defendant] successfully rebuts the prima facie case, the burden of production shifts back to the Government and merges with the ultimate burden of persuasion, which is incumbent on the Government at all times.” Chi. Bridge & Iron, 534 F.3d at 423.8