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of these cases the court showed appropriate deference to our opinions in Noerr and Pennington, in which we held that the act of petitioning the government (usually in the form of lobbying) deserves especially broad protection from antitrust liability. The Court can point to nothing in these three opinions that would require a different result here. The two remaining cases—in which the Courts of Appeals did state that a successful lawsuit could be a sham—did not involve lobbying, but did contain much broader and more complicated allegations than petitioners presented below.8 Like the three opinions described above, these decisions should not be expected to offer guidance, nor be blamed for spawning confusion, in a case alleging that the filing of a single lawsuit violated the Sherman Act.
Even in this Court, more complicated cases, in which, for example, the alleged competitive injury has involved something more than the threat of an adverse outcome in a single
the defendant's actions, which primarily consisted in lobbying for the abolition of plaintiff's mail-order prescription business, were immune under Noerr-Pennington.
8 In Grip-Pak, Inc. v. Illinois Tool Works, Inc., 694 F. 2d 466 (1982) (Posner, J.), cert. denied, 461 U. S. 958 (1983), the antitrust defendant's alleged violations of several provisions of the Sherman and Clayton Acts included much more than the filing of a single lawsuit; they encompassed a broad scheme of monopolizing the entire relevant market by: purchasing patents; threatening to file many other, patently groundless lawsuits; acquiring a competitor; dividing markets; and filing a fraudulent patent application. In In re Burlington Northern, Inc., 822 F. 2d 518 (CA5 1987), cert. denied, 484 U. S. 1007 (1988), the plaintiffs alleged, and produced evidence to support their theory, that the defendant had filed suit solely to cause them a delay of crippling expense, and the defendants had either brought or unsuccessfully defended a succession of related lawsuits involving plaintiff's right to compete. In both of these cases the Courts of Appeals ably attempted to balance strict enforcement of the antitrust laws with possible abuses of the judicial process. That they permitted some reliance on subjective motivation—as even we have done in cases alleging abuse of judicial process, see California Motor Transport Co. v. Trucking Unlimited, 404 U. S. 508, 513-518 (1972)—is neither surprising nor relevant in a case involving no such allegations.
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