Sotomayor's Antitrust Decisions More In Line With Conservatives on Court

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are scheduled to begin July 13. Much focus has been placed on Sotomayor’s judicial decisions and speeches on topics other than antitrust law. Despite writing hundreds of decisions and sitting on panels issuing hundreds more, Sotomayor has only penned five published antitrust opinions during her 10-year term on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The other 13 antitrust cases that came before her as a circuit judge were instead disposed of in short, unpublished non-precedential summary orders not signed by any judge and often just adopting the reasoning of the district court. These are the same types of widely used summary orders that were frowned upon by the Supreme Court last week in the Ricci civil rights case, which reversed the 2nd Circuit’s one-paragraph summary order of a panel on which Sotomayor sat.

An understanding of Sotomayor’s work on antitrust cases is especially relevant considering both the Obama administration’s recent initiative for stricter enforcement of the antitrust laws and the Supreme Court’s increased fervor to hear antitrust cases in the past decade. The court has granted certiorari in 10 antitrust cases since 2003 and is expected to continue hearing such important issues, having granted certiorari last week in an important antitrust case involving the National Football League.