542
Opinion of Breyer, J.
before a congressionally authorized and politically accountable administrative agency that acts as a screen for meritless complaints. See ibid.; see also 64 NLRB Ann. Rep. 5 (1999) (showing that of 27,450 unfair labor practice cases closed in 1999, only 1.4% were resolved by an order of the Board in a contested case).
Other differences, those related to scope, purpose, and history, are major and determinative. Antitrust law focuses generally upon anticompetitive conduct that can arise in myriad circumstances. Anticompetitively motivated lawsuits occupy but one tiny corner of the anticompetitive-activity universe. To circumscribe the boundaries of that corner does not significantly limit the scope of antitrust law or undermine any basic related purpose.
By way of contrast, the NLRA finds in the need to regulate an employer's antiunion lawsuits much of its historical reason for being. Throughout the 19th century, courts had upheld prosecutions of unions as criminal conspiracies. C. Tomlins, The State and the Unions 36-45 (1985). They had struck down protective labor legislation—for, say, shorter working hours or better working conditions. W. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement 38, and n. 7 (1991) (by 1900, courts had struck down roughly 60 labor laws, and by 1920, roughly 300). They had granted injunctions against employees and labor unions that weakened the unions' ability to organize. Id., at 61-62 (conservatively estimating at least 4,300 injunctions issued in labor conflicts between 1880 and 1930). And in the process they had reinterpreted federal statutes that Congress had not intended for use against the organizing activities of labor unions. See, e. g., In re Debs, 158 U. S. 564 (1895) (applying Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 to union activities); Loewe v. Lawlor, 208 U. S. 274 (1908) (applying Sherman Act); see generally F. Frankfurter & N. Greene, The Labor Injunction (1930).
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