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nition but can be shown to be objectively unreasonable, and thus shams. It might not be objectively reasonable to bring a lawsuit just because some form of success on the merits— no matter how insignificant—could be expected.2 With that possibility in mind, the Court should avoid an unnecessarily broad holding that it might regret when confronted with a more complicated case.
As the Court recently explained, a "sham" is the use of "the governmental process—as opposed to the outcome of that process—as an anticompetitive weapon." Columbia v. Omni Outdoor Advertising, Inc., 499 U. S. 365, 380 (1991). The distinction between abusing the judicial process to restrain competition and prosecuting a lawsuit that, if successful, will restrain competition must guide any court's decision whether a particular filing, or series of filings, is a sham. The label "sham" is appropriately applied to a case, or series of cases, in which the plaintiff is indifferent to the outcome of the litigation itself, but has nevertheless sought to impose a collateral harm on the defendant by, for example, impairing his credit, abusing the discovery process, or interfering with his access to governmental agencies. It might also apply to a plaintiff who had some reason to expect success on the merits but because of its tremendous cost would not bother to achieve that result without the benefit of collateral inju-outcome, the suit is immunized under Noerr . . . ." But see ante, at 62: "The existence of probable cause to institute legal proceedings precludes a finding that an antitrust defendant has engaged in sham litigation." And see ante, at 65: "Columbia's copyright action was arguably 'warranted by existing law' " under the standards of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11. These varied restatements of the Court's new test make it unclear whether it is willing to affirm the Court of Appeals by any of these standards individually, or by all of them together.
2 The Court's recent decision in Farrar v. Hobby, 506 U. S. 103 (1992) makes me wonder whether "10 years of litigation and two trips to the Court of Appeals" to recover "one dollar from one defendant," id., at 116 (O'Connor, J., concurring), would qualify as a reasonable expectation of "favorable relief" under today's opinion.
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