632
Opinion of the Court
had held that the existence of a state regulatory program, if staffed, funded, and empowered by law, satisfied the requirement of active supervision. Id., at 1071. Under this standard, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that the active state supervision requirement was met in all four States and held that the respondents' conduct was entitled to state-action immunity in each of them. 922 F. 2d, at 1140.
We granted certiorari to consider two questions: First, whether the Third Circuit was correct in its statement of the law and in its application of law to fact, and second, whether the Third Circuit exceeded its authority by departing from the factual findings entered by the ALJ and adopted by the Commission. Before this Court, the parties have confined their briefing on the first of these questions to the regulatory regimes of Wisconsin and Montana, and focused on the regulatory regimes of Connecticut and Arizona in briefing on the second question. We now reverse the Court of Appeals under the first question and remand for further proceedings under the second.
II
The preservation of the free market and of a system of free enterprise without price fixing or cartels is essential to economic freedom. United States v. Topco Associates, Inc., 405 U. S. 596, 610 (1972). A national policy of such a pervasive and fundamental character is an essential part of the economic and legal system within which the separate States administer their own laws for the protection and advancement of their people. Continued enforcement of the national antitrust policy grants the States more freedom, not less, in deciding whether to subject discrete parts of the economy to additional regulations and controls. Against this background, in Parker v. Brown, 317 U. S. 341 (1943), we upheld a state-supervised, market sharing scheme against a Sherman Act challenge. We announced the doctrine that federal antitrust laws are subject to supersession by state regula-
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