Court Opinion

ID: 9426336
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:17:36.443727+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:00.331560
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Marshall,
concurring.
While I join the Court’s opinion, I wish to add a word about the applicability of the exemption provided by the Nonprofit Institutions Act. To my mind, the key to the Act is that it exempts from the Robinson-Patman Act not only an itemized list of institutions, but also all “charitable institutions not operated for profit.” 15 U. S. C. § 13c. This suggests to me that the named institutions — schools, colleges, universities, public libraries, churches, and hospitals — were not intended to be limited to their traditional activities in qualifying for the exemption, but may expand those activities and still qualify so long as any new activities for which exempted supplies are purchased are charitable and not operated for profit.
I agree with the Court that the exemption is not “to be applied and expanded automatically to whatever new *22venture the nonprofit hospital finds attractive in these changing days.” Ante, at 13. But I believe the exemption is applicable to any new venture the hospital finds attractive and that is both charitable and not operated for profit. There is no suggestion — nor could one be made — that the activities the Court today finds outside the exemption fall within this category,* so there is no need to address this problem here. But I write to emphasize that I do not read the Court’s opinion as foreclosing hospitals — or other exempted institutions — from expanding their charitable activities in highly untraditional ways and still qualifying for the exemption.
Likewise, I agree with the'Court that the proper inquiry in this case is whether each kind of drug sale by the hospital “is a part of and promotes the hospital’s intended institutional operation in the care of persons who are its patients.” Ante, at 14. However, when a nonprofit institution makes sales for profit, as here, analysis is furthered, I suggest, by recognition of the purpose of the “own use” limitation.
Since all charitable institutions are covered by the Act, the purpose quite obviously is not to freeze a particular charitable institution into a particular kind of charity. Rather, as I understand it, the purpose of the limitation is generally to preclude the institution from taking advantage of its antitrust exemption by buying low-cost supplies solely for the purpose of reselling them at a profit. That is, Congress was primarily interested in directly aiding nonprofit institutions by lowering their operating expenses, but not interested in indirectly aiding *23such institutions by providing them with the means of raising additional money — particularly when such resales of supplies would put the institution in competition with retail businesses not eligible for the exemption. While I do not believe Congress meant to preclude profit-making sales in the course of the institution’s charitable activities — and so I agree that the Court’s inquiry is the correct one — I suggest that the nexus between particular sales and those activities should be particularly closely scrutinized when a profit is made to assure that the sales are not made primarily for moneymaking purposes. Thus, sales only arguably within the scope of the institution’s charitable activities might be exempted when made on a nonprofit basis and not exempted when made for profit. After analysis with this balancing factor in mind, I agree with the lines drawn by the Court and concur in its opinion.

This case would be much more difficult for me if the hospitals involved did not all make profits on the sale of drugs to outsiders. Ante, at 7. If they did not, we would have to determine in each case whether such sales, even if not within the hospital's institutional function, nonetheless constituted a “charitable" venture of their own.