Fortner Enterprises, Inc v. United States Steel Corp

• Court: U.S. Supreme Court
• Writing for the Court: BLACK
• Citation: Fortner Enterprises, Inc v. United States Steel Corp, 394 U.S. 495, 89 S.Ct. 1252, 22 L.Ed.2d 495 (1969)
• Decision Date: 07 April 1969
• Docket Number: No. 306,306
• Parties: FORTNER ENTERPRISES, INC., Petitioner, v. UNITED STATES STEEL CORP. et al

394 U.S. 495

89 S.Ct. 1252

22 L.Ed.2d 495

FORTNER ENTERPRISES, INC., Petitioner,

v UNITED STATES STEEL CORP. et al.

No. 306.

Argued Jan. 23, 1969.

Decided April 7, 1969.

Kenneth L. Anderson, Louisville, Ky., for petitioner.

Macdonald Flinn, New York City, for respondents.

Mr. Justice BLACK delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case raises a variety of questions concerning the proper standards to be applied by a United States district court in passing on a motion for summary judgment in a civil antitrust action. Petitioner, Fortner Enterprises, Inc., filed this suit seeking treble damages and an injunction against alleged violations of §§ 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 26 Stat. 209, as amended, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1, 2. The complaint charged that respondents, United States Steel Corp. and its wholly owned subsidiary, the United States Steel Homes Credit Corp., had engaged in a contract, combination, and conspiracy to restrain trade and to monopolize trade in the sale of prefabricated houses. It alleged that there was a continuing agreement between respondents 'to force corporations and individuals, including the plaintiff, as a condition to availing themselves of the services of United States Steel Homes Credit Corporation, to purchase at artificially high prices only United States Steel Homes * * *.' Specifically, petitioner claimed that in order to obtain loans totaling over $2,000,000 from the Credit Corp. for the purchase and development of certain land in the Louisville, Kentucky, area, it had been required to agree, as a condition of the loans, to erect a prefabricated house manufactured by U.S. Steel on each of the lots purchased with the loan proceeds. Petitioner claimed that the prefabricated materials were then supplied by U.S. Steel at unreasonably high prices and proved to be defective and unusable, thus requiring the expenditure of additional sums and delaying the completion date for the development. Petitioner sought treble damages for the profits thus lost, along with a decree enjoining respondents from enforcing the requirement of the loan agreement that petitioner use only houses manufactured by U.S. Steel.

After pretrial proceedings in which a number of affidavits and answers to interrogatories were filed, the District Court entered summary judgment for respondents, holding that petitioner's allegations had failed to raise any question of fact as to a possible violation of the antitrust laws, 293 F.Supp. 762. Noting that the agreement involved here was essentially a tying arrangement, under which the purchaser was required to take a tied product—here prefabricated homes—as a condition of being allowed to purchase the tying product—here credit, the District Judge held that petitioner had failed to establish the prerequisites of illegality under our tying cases, namely sufficient market power over the tying product and foreclosure of a substantial volume of commerce in the tied product. The Court of Appeals affirmed without opinion 6 Cir., 404 F.2d 936, and we granted certiorari, 393 U.S. 820, 89 S.Ct. 126, 21 L.Ed.2d 92 (1968). Since we find no basis for sustaining this summary judgment, we reverse and order that the case proceed to trial.

We agree with the District Court that the conduct challenged here primarily involves a tying arrangement of the traditional kind. The Credit Corp. sold its credit only on the condition that petitioner purchase a certain number of prefabricated houses from the Homes Division of U.S. Steel. Our cases have made clear that, at least when certain prerequisites are met, arrangements of this kind are illegal in and of themselves, and no specific showing of unreasonable competitive effect is required. The discussion in Northern Pacific R. Co. v. United States, 356 U.S. 1, 5-6, 78 S.Ct. 514, 518, 2 L.Ed.2d 545 (1958), is dispositive of this question:

'(T)here are certain agreements or practices which because of their pernicious effect on competition and lack of any redeeming virtue are conclusively presumed to be unreasonable and therefore illegal without elaborate inquiry as to the precise harm they have caused or the business excuse for their use. * * *

'* * * Where (tying) conditions are successfully exacted competition on the merits with respect to the tied product is inevitably curbed. Indeed 'tying agreements serve hardly any purpose beyond the suppression of competition.' Standard Oil Co. of California v. United States, 337 U.S. 293, 305-306, 69 S.Ct. 1051, 1058, 93 L.Ed. 1371. They deny competitors free access to the market for the tied product, not because the party imposing the tying requirements has a better product or a lower price but because of his power or leverage in another market. At the same time buyers are forced to forego their free choice between competing products. For these reasons 'tying agreements fare harshly under the laws forbidding restraints of trade.' Times-Picayune Publishing Co. v. United States, 345 U.S. 594, 606, 73 S.Ct. 872, 879, 97 L.Ed. 1277. They are unreasonable in and of themselves whenever a party has sufficient economic power with respect to the tying product to appreciably restrain free competition in the market for the tied product and a 'not insubstantial' amount of interstate commerce is affected. International Salt Co. v. United States, 332 U.S. 392, 68 S.Ct. 12, 92 L.Ed. 20.' (Footnote omitted.)

Despite its recognition of this strict standard, the District Court held that petitioner had not even made out a case for the jury. The court held that respondents did not have 'sufficient economic power' over credit, the tying product here, because although the Credit Corp.'s terms evidently made the loans uniquely attractive to petitioner, petitioner had not proved that the Credit Corp. enjoyed the same unique attractiveness or economic contr l with respect to buyers generally. The court also held that the amount of interstate commerce affected was 'insubstantial' because only a very small percentage of the land available for development in the area was foreclosed to competing sellers of prefabricated houses by the contract with petitioner. We think it plain that the District Court misunderstood the two controlling standards and misconceived the extent of its authority to evaluate the evidence in ruling on this motion for summary judgment.

A preliminary error that should not pass unnoticed is the District Court's assumption that the two prerequisites mentioned in Northern Pacific are standards that petitioner must meet in order to prevail on the merits. On the contrary, these standards are necessary only to bring into play the doctrine of per se illegality. Where the standards were found satisfied in Northern Pacific, and in International Salt Co. v. United States, 332 U.S. 392, 68 S.Ct. 12, 92 L.Ed. 20 (1947), this Court approved summary judgment against the defendants but by no means implied that inability to satisfy these standards would be fatal to a plaintiff's case. A plaintiff can still prevail on the merits whenever he can prove, on the basis of a more thorough examination of the purposes and effects of the practices involved, that the general standards of the Sherman Act have been violated. Accordingly, even if we could agree with the District Court that the Northern Pacific standards were not satisfied here, the summary judgment against petitioner still could not be entered without further examination of petitioner's general allegations that respondents conspired together for the purpose of restraining competition and acquiring a monopoly in the market for prefabricated houses. And such an examination could rarely justify summary judgment with respect to a claim of this kind, for as we said in Poller v. Columbia Broadcasting, 368 U.S. 464, 473, 82 S.Ct. 486, 491, 7 L.Ed.2d 458 (1962):

'We believe that summary procedures should be used sparingly in complex antitrust litigation where motive and intent play leading roles, the proof is largely in the hands of the alleged conspirators, and hostile witnesses thicken the plot. It is only when the witnesses are present and subject to cross-examination that their credibility and the weight to be given their testimony can be appraised. Trial by affidavit is no substitute for trial by jury which so long has been the hallmark of 'even handed justice." (Footnote omitted.)

We need not consider, however, whether petitioner is entitled to a trial on this more general theory, for it is clear that petitioner raised questions of fact which, if proved at trial, would bring this tying arrangement within the scope of the per se doctrine. The requirement that a 'not insubstantial' amount of commerce be involved makes no reference to the scope of any particular market or to the share of that market foreclosed by the tie, and hence we could not approve of the trial judge's conclusions on this issue even if we agreed that his definition of the relevant market was the proper one. ¹ An analysis of market shares might become relevant if it were alleged that an apparently small dollar-volume of business actually represented a substantial part of the sales for which competitors were bidding. But normally the controlling consideration is simply whether a total amount of business, substantial enough in terms of dollar-volume so as not to be merely de minimis, is foreclosed to competitors by the tie, for as we said in International Salt, it is 'unreasonable, per se, to foreclose competitors from any substantial market' by a tying arrangement, 332 U.S. at 396, 68 S.Ct. at 15.

The complaint and affidavits filed here leave no room for doubt that the volume of commerce allegedly foreclosed was substantial. It may be true, as respondents claim, that petitioner's annual purchases of houses from U.S. Steel under the tying arrangement never exceeded $190,000, while more than $500,000 in annual sales was involved in the tying arrangement held illegal in International Salt, but we cannot agree...