66
bia's economic motivations in bringing suit, which were rendered irrelevant by the objective legal reasonableness of the litigation. The existence of probable cause eliminated any "genuine issue as to any material fact," Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 56(c), and summary judgment properly issued.
We affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.
So ordered.
Justice Souter, concurring.
The Court holds today that a person cannot incur antitrust liability merely by bringing a lawsuit as long as the suit is not "objectively baseless in the sense that no reasonable litigant could realistically expect success on the merits." Ante, at 60. The Court assumes that the District Court and the Court of Appeals were finding this very test satisfied when they concluded that Columbia's suit against PRE for copyright infringement was supported by "probable cause," a standard which, as the Court explains it in this case, requires a "reasonabl[e] belie[f] that there is a chance that [a] claim may be held valid upon adjudication." Ante, at 62-63 (internal quotation marks omitted). I agree that this term, so defined, is rightly read as expressing the same test that the Court announces today; the expectation of a reasonable litigant can be dubbed a "reasonable belief," and realistic expectation of success on the merits can be paraphrased as "a chance of being held valid upon adjudication."
Having established this identity of meaning, however, the Court proceeds to discuss the particular facts of this case, not in terms of its own formulation of objective baselessness, but in terms of "probable cause." Up to a point, this is understandable; the Court of Appeals used the term "probable cause" to represent objective reasonableness, and it seems natural to use the same term when reviewing that court's conclusions. Yet as the Court acknowledges, ante, at 63, since there is no dispute over the facts underlying the suit
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