The U.S. Supreme Court has referred to the federal antitrust laws as "a charter of freedom [having] a generality and adaptability comparable to that found to be desirable in constitutional provisions."1 The antitrust laws are generally broadly worded, and they have been subject to various interpretations and reinterpretations over the past century. Certain types of anti-competitive activity, such as horizontal price fixing, have been deemed so obviously harmful to the marketplace as to be declared per se illegal. Others are judged by the so-called "rule of reason" analysis, in which courts weigh the effect on a defined market of the alleged anti-competitive activity.
There are few exceptions to the antitrust laws. One of these is action taken by a state as a sovereign to purposely limit competition in furtherance of a particular public purpose. The Supreme Court recognized the state action exception in Parker v. Brown2 which upheld California’s regulation of competition in the raisin industry:
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