Court limits Hobbs Act, Sherman Act
on Feb 28, 2006 at 10:02 am
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that the federal Hobbs Act does not outlaw acts or threats of violence, thus undercutting a verdict and a nationwide injunction that abortion clinics had won against anti-abortion demonstrators.
Putting an end to a marathon, 19-year dispute, the Court ordered a federal appeals court to enter a ruling in favor of the demonstrators and their organizations. The ruling came in the cases of Scheidler v. National Organization for Women (04-1244) and Operation Rescue v. National Organization for Women (04–1352).
Abortion clinics had relied upon the Hobbs Act in asserting claims of violence and threats of violence intended to shut down the clinics’ operations — acts that the clinics contended provided a basis for their claim of violations of the RICO law against racketeering organizations. In Tuesday’s ruling, the Court rejected the only remaining premise of the clinics’ claim, declaring that “physical violence unrelated to robbery or extortion falls outside the Hobbs Act’s scope.”
In the second of two rulings on argued cases, the Court, again unanimous, decided that it is not an automatic (“per se”) violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act for competing companies that have integrated their operations in a joint venture to set the prices at which the venture’s products are sold. The decision came in the cases of Texaco v. Dagher (04-805) and Shell Oil v. Dagher (04-814). (See below for further details of this ruling.)
New Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., did not take part in either ruling; the cases were argued before he joined the Court.
The Scheidler-Operation Rescue case had been to the Court twice before. In 1994, the Court, in a decision favoring the abortion providers, ruled that the clinics could sue under RICO without offering proof that the clinic blockades were done for economic reasons. But, in 2003, the Court ruled by an 8-1 vote that the Hobbs Act applied only to extortion that involved the actual taking of property, not when violence or threats violated the rights of patients or doctors. That had seemed, at the time, to end the case that had begun with the filing of the case in 1986.
In Tuesday’s decision, written by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the Court declared that the Hobbs Act requires a link between violence or threats and robbery or extortion. There is no free-standing crime under the Act of violence or threats that affect interstate commerce, the Court ruled. Tracing the history of the Act back to its original passage in 1934, the Court said that Congress had never broken the required link between violence and robbery or extortion. If the clinics’ expansive view of the criminalization of violence or threats alone were adopted, the opinion said, “it would federalize much ordinary criminal behavior, ranging from simple assault to murder, behavior that typically is the subject of state, not federal, prosecution.”
The ruling was based strictly on statutory interpretation, and was written without conveying any of the emotions that have always surrounded this dispute over attempts to shut down clinics across the nation. Breyer’s spare 11-page opinion was an almost anti-climactic conclusion to the searing dispute.
The Court’s ruling in the Texaco/Shell case similarly was a brisk, six-page opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas. The decision expressly left unresolved a major antitrust issue that lurked in the background of the case: whether the Sherman Act’s bans on restraints of trade does not apply at all to joint ventures.
Instead, the ruling was confined to the sole issue on which review was granted: whether price-setting by a joint venture on its products would always violate the Act’s Section 1. The case involved an antitrust lawsuit by operators of 23,000 service stations selling under the Texas or Shell brands of gasoline. It challenged the western states joint venture of the two giant oil companies for marketing gasoline, with the product still sold under both the Texaco and Shell brands but at the same price. The lawsuit did not claim a violation of Sherman Section 1 based on a rule-of-reason analysis.
