Court Opinion

ID: 9479591
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:22:37.737796+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:08.243030
License: Public Domain

W. EUGENE DAVIS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Because I believe the district court’s charge and the interrogatories it submitted to the jury adequately framed the issues in this case, I would affirm the judgment the district court entered on the verdict.
The majority concludes that this entire case must be retried because it cannot determine whether the jury erroneously applied the Noerr-Pennington defense, and absolved the defendant of liability for purely private conduct.
The court’s charge plainly limits application of the Noerr-Pennington defense to *1438liability arising from the defendant’s lobbying efforts with city officials. In explaining the scope of the Noerr-Pennington defense, the court charged: “If the defendant demonstrates that the conduct complained of was the result of its lobbying efforts, that anti-competitive activity or anti-competitive result is not subject to antitrust laws. ...” Record Vol. 5, page 15 (emphasis added).
After receiving this charge, the jury then declared in answer to interrogatory six that “the anticompetitive conduct referred to in [interrogatories one through four] resulted in defendant’s good faith effort to influence public officials. ...”
Although counsels’ closing argument was not included as part of the record on appeal, the plaintiff was certainly entitled to argue to the jury that if it found that the defendant engaged in predatory pricing or other purely private anticompetitive conduct, it should answer interrogatory six “no.” The “yes” answer to this interrogatory tells me the jury found that all of the defendant’s anticompetitive conduct was the result of its lobbying efforts with city officials.1
There are no perfect trials and this one is no exception, but in my view the issues were adequately framed and the jury’s verdict allows us to discern its findings. I see no necessity for a retrial.2

. The district court’s special verdict form did not instruct the jury to skip interrogatory seven, the damage interrogatory, if it found the Noerr-Pennington defense available to defendants. I do not understand therefore how the jury’s response to the damage interrogatory supports the majority’s conclusion that the defendant engaged in private anticompetitive conduct.

. If we assume that the jury's responses to the interrogatories cast doubt on whether it applied the Noerr-Pennington defense to plaintiff's purely private predatory pricing claim, I would restrict the retrial to that predatory pricing claim. I would also give the district court discretion to determine whether to retry damages on the predatory pricing claim or to accept the $30,000 sum awarded in interrogatory seven (3) which included plaintiff's predatory pricing claim.