What is the Worst Antitrust Decision That is Good Law?
There’s been a bit of discussion about the “most destructive” decision that is good law around the blogs, e.g. here and here, in response to John McCain’s criticism of Boumedine calling it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” The line of discussion led me to think about the titular question. Antitrust law has the fairly odd feature that lower court decisions are overturned at a fairly low rate. There are a handful of SCOTUS reversals of old, “bad” precedent, e.g. Leegin overturned Dr. Miles, State Oil overturned Albrecht, Independent Ink overturned the rule that a patent holder was presumed to have market power in tying cases (my analysis here). In fact, prior to Leegin, the SCOTUS had been routinely reversing some bad prior precedent with little discussion (compare the reaction to Leegin to the unanimous State Oil decision on Max RPM in 1997 in which there was zero talk of stare decisis!).
