recognizing that the right to bring and defend litigation implicates the First Amendment and holding that bringing allegedly frivolous litigation could only be sanctioned if the lawsuit was “objectively baseless in the sense that no reasonable litigant could realistically expect success on the merits” and stating that “[o]nly if challenged litigation is objectively meritless may a court examine the litigant’s subjective motivation.”
How later courts described this case
- recognizing that the right to bring and defend litigation implicates the First Amendment and holding that bringing allegedly frivolous litigation could only be sanctioned if the lawsuit was “objectively baseless in the sense that no reasonable litigant could realistically expect success on the merits” and stating that “[o]nly if challenged litigation is objectively meritless may a court examine the litigant’s subjective motivation.”
- explaining that "tjjust as evidence of [wrongful] intent cannot affect the objective prong of Noerr's sham exception, a showing of malice alone will neither entitle the wrongful civil proceedings plaintiff to prevail nor permit the factfinder to infer the absence or probable cause”
- stating that to support antitrust liability, a suit must be "objectively baseless in the sense that no reasonable litigant could realistically expect success on the merits [or] could conclude that the suit is reasonably calculated to elicit a favorable outcome."
- concluding that "[e]ven in the absence of supporting authority, [the defendant] would have been entitled to press a novel copyright claim as long as a similarly situated reasonable litigant could have perceived some likelihood of success"
Written by the judges who cited it.
Later courts went against this
Declined to follow by Manistee Town Center v. City of Glendale, 227 F.3d 1090 (2000)
We decline to apply the Professional Real Estate Investors standard here.
Distinguished
Distinguished by Cardtoons, L.C., an Oklahoma Limited Liability Company v. Major League Baseball Players Association, an Unincorporated Association, 208 F.3d 885 (2000)
Therefore, given the non-antitrust context of this case, the dissent’s reliance on PRE in Part II, C is inapposite.
The opinion
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 ease, requires a “reasonable] 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 *67 at issue here, the question whether that suit was objectively baseless is purely one of law, which we are obliged to consider de novo. There is therefore no need to frame the question in the Court of Appeals’s terms. Accordingly, I would prefer to put the question in our own terms, and to conclude simply that, on the undisputed facts and the law as it stood when Columbia filed its suit, a reasonable litigant could realistically have expected success on the merits.
My preference stems from a concern that other courts could read today’s opinion as transplanting every substantive nuance and procedural quirk of the common-law tort of wrongful civil proceedings into federal antitrust law. I do not understand the Court to mean anything of the sort, however, any more than I understand its citation of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, see ante, at 65, to signal the importation of every jot and tittle of the law of attorney sanctions. Rather, I take the Court’s use of the term “probable cause” merely as shorthand for a reasonable litigant’s realistic expectation of success on the merits, and on that understanding, I join the Court’s opinion.