Court Opinion

ID: 9426152
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:16:59.28723+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:59.350640
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
dissenting.
I believe that the scope of the Clayton Act should be held to extend to acquisitions and sales having a substantial effect on interstate commerce. I therefore dissent. For me, the reach of § 7 of the Clayton Act, 38 Stat. 731, as amended, 15 U. S. C. § 18, is as broad as that of the Sherman Act, and should not be given the narrow construction we properly have given, just this Term, to the Iiobinson-Patman Act. Gulf Oil Corp. v. Copp Paving Co., 419 U. S. 186 (1974).
For more than a quarter of a century the Court has held that the Sherman Act should be construed broadly to reach the full extent of the commerce power, and to proscribe those restraints that substantially affect interstate commerce. See, e. g., Mandeville Island Farms, Inc. v. American Crystal Sugar Co., 334 U. S. 219, 234 (1948); United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Assn., 322 U. S. 533, 558 (1944). The Clayton Act was enacted to supplement the Sherman Act, and to “arrest in its incipiency” any restraint or substantial lessening of competition. United States v. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., 353 U. S. 586, 589 (1957). To ascribe *288to Congress the intent to exercise less than its full commerce power in the Clayton Act, which has as its purpose the supplementation of the protections afforded by the Sherman Act, is both highly anomalous and, it seems to me, unwarranted. Section 7 should not be limited, as the Court limits it today, to corporations engaged in interstate commerce, but should be held to include those intrastate activities substantially affecting interstate commerce.