Cangrejeros de Santurce Baseball Club, LLC, et al. v. Liga de Béisbol Professional de Puerto Rico, Inc., et al.

Ordinarily, there would be no question that collusion among ostensible adversaries to expel a competitor from a market would give rise to federal antitrust liability. But not when it comes to the business of baseball, which for longer than a century has enjoyed the protection of an illogical, sport-specific antitrust exemption. The baseball antitrust exemption’s genesis is Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, 259 U.S. 200 (1922), decided at the height of the Lochner era—a time when the Court routinely invalidated economic regulations in favor of its own notion of appropriate public policy. The doctrine has been reaffirmed twice in the years since, in Toolson v. New York Yankees, 346 U.S. 356 (1953), and Flood v. Kuhn, 407 U.S. 258 (1972). Yet over the same intervening years, the Court has expressly repudiated the exemption’s conceptual underpinning (see Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942)) and refused to extend its rationale to other professional sports leagues (see United States v. International Boxing Club of New York, 348 U.S. 236 (1955); Radovich v. NFL, 352 U.S. 445 (1957)). The lower courts, meanwhile, have applied the exemption in highly inconsistent ways, which both commentators and Members of the Court have criticized as aberrational, illogical, and all around indefensible. Against this backdrop, the questions presented are:

1. Should the Court discard the baseball exemption by overruling Federal Baseball, Toolson, and Flood?

2. If the Court does not overrule Federal Baseball, Toolson, and Flood, should it narrowly construe the baseball exemption as applicable only to the circumstances presented in those cases?