804
Opinion of the Court
employers to establish industry-wide terms of employment. These sorts of concerted actions, similar to what is alleged to have occurred here, are not properly characterized as "boycotts," and the word does not appear in the opinions.3 In fact, in the 65 years between the coining of the word and enactment of the McCarran-Ferguson Act in 1945, "boycott" appears in only seven opinions of this Court involving commercial (nonlabor) antitrust matters, and not once is it used as Justice Souter uses it—to describe a concerted refusal to engage in particular transactions until the terms of those transactions are agreeable.4
In addition to its use in the antitrust field, the concept of "boycott" frequently appears in labor law, and in this context as well there is a clear distinction between boycotts and concerted agreements seeking terms. The ordinary strike
3 Justice Souter points out that the Court in St. Paul Fire & Marine Ins. Co. v. Barry, 438 U. S. 531 (1978), found the term "boycott" "does not refer to ' "a unitary phenomenon," ' " ante, at 788 (quoting Barry, supra, at 543 (quoting P. Areeda, Antitrust Analysis 381 (2d ed. 1974))), and asserts that our position contradicts this. Ante, at 793-794. But to be not a "unitary phenomenon" is different from being an all-encompassing one. "Boycott" is a multifaceted "phenomenon" that includes conditional boycotts, punitive boycotts, coercive boycotts, partial boycotts, labor boycotts, political boycotts, social boycotts, etc. It merely does not include refusals to deal because of objections to proposed terms.
4 See United States v. Frankfort Distilleries, Inc., 324 U. S. 293, 295- 296, 298 (1945) (refusal to engage in all transactions with targeted companies unless they agreed to defendants' price-fixing scheme); United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Assn., 322 U. S. 533, 535, 536, 562 (1944) (discussed infra, at 808-809); United States v. Bausch & Lomb Optical Co., 321 U. S. 707, 722 (1944) (word used in reference to a refusal to deal as means of enforcing resale price maintenance); Fashion Originators' Guild of America, Inc. v. FTC, 312 U. S. 457, 461, 465, 467 (1941) (boycott of retailers who sold competitors' products); United States v. American Livestock Commission Co., 279 U. S. 435, 436-438 (1929) (absolute boycott of a competing livestock association, intended to drive it out of business); Eastern States Retail Lumber Dealers' Assn. v. United States, 234 U. S. 600, 610-611 (1914) (discussed supra, at 803); Nash v. United States, 229 U. S. 373, 376 (1913) (word used in passing).
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