Court Opinion

ID: 9426594
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:21.33857+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:01.816085
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Burger,
concurring in the judgment and in all except Parts II and IV of the Court’s opinion.
I concur in the judgment and in all except Parts II and IV of the Court’s opinion. I do not agree, however, that Parker v. Brown, 317 U. S. 341 (1943), can logically be *604limited to suits against state officials. In interpreting Parker, the Court has heretofore focused on the challenged activity, not upon the identity of the parties to the suit.
“The threshold inquiry in determining if an anti-competitive activity is state action of the type the Sherman Act was not meant to proscribe is whether the activity is .required by the State acting as sovereign.” Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar, 421 U. S. 773, 790 (1975) (emphasis added).
If Parker’s holding were limited simply to the nonliability of state officials, then the Court’s inquiry in Goldfarb as to the County Bar Association’s claimed exemption could have ended upon our recognition that the organization was “a voluntary association and not a state agency ....” 421 U, S., at 790. Yet, before determining that there was no exemption from the antitrust laws, the Court proceeded to treat the Association’s contention that its action, having been “prompted” by the State Bar, was “state action for Sherman Act purposes.” Ibid.
The reading of Parker in Part II is unnecessary to the result in this case; that decision simply does not address the precise issue raised by the present case. There was no need in Parker to focus upon the situation where the State, in addition to requiring a public utility “to meet regulatory criteria insofar as it is exercising its natural monopoly powers,” ante, at 596, also purports, without any independent regulatory purpose, to control the utility’s activities in separate, competitive markets. Today the Court correctly concludes:
“The Commission’s approval of respondent’s decision to maintain such a program does not . . . implement any statewide policy relating to light bulbs. We infer that the State’s policy is neutral on the ques*605tion whether a utility should, or should not, have such a program.” Ante, at 585 (emphasis added).
To find a “state action” exemption on the basis of Michigan’s undifferentiated sanction of this ancillary practice could serve no federal or state policy.