Hartford Fire Ins. Co. v. California, 509 U.S. 764, 7 (1993)

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770

HARTFORD FIRE INS. CO. v. CALIFORNIA

Opinion of the Court

munized from antitrust liability by the McCarran-Ferguson Act, and that, even assuming it applies, the principle of international comity does not preclude District Court jurisdiction over the foreign conduct alleged.

I

The two petitions before us stem from consolidated litigation comprising the complaints of 19 States and many private plaintiffs alleging that the defendants, members of the insurance industry, conspired in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act to restrict the terms of coverage of commercial general liability (CGL) insurance 1 available in the United States. Because the cases come to us on motions to dismiss, we take the allegations of the complaints as true.2

A

According to the complaints, the object of the conspiracies was to force certain primary insurers (insurers who sell insurance directly to consumers) to change the terms of their

1 CGL insurance provides "coverage for third party casualty damage claims against a purchaser of insurance (the 'insured')." App. 8 (Cal. Complaint ¶ 4.a).

2 Following the lower courts and the parties, see In re Insurance Antitrust Litigation, 938 F. 2d 919, 924, 925 (CA9 1991), we will treat the complaint filed by California as representative of the claims of Alabama, Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, and the complaint filed by Connecticut as representative of the claims of Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington. As will become apparent, the California and Connecticut Complaints differ slightly in their presentations of background information and their claims for relief; their statements of facts are identical. Because the private party plaintiffs have chosen in their brief in this Court to use the California Complaint as a "representative model" of their claims, Brief for Respondents (Private Party Plaintiffs) 3, n. 6, we will assume that their complaints track that complaint. On remand, the courts below will of course be free to take into account any relevant differences among the complaints that the parties may bring to their attention.

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