Facts
Leegin Creative Leather Products, Leegin, a manufacturer of leather apparel, concluded that its interests would be best served by opting out of a price war "race to the bottom," focusing instead on quality and brand cachet. Accordingly, with specific exceptions, it decided to refuse sale to retailers if they intended to discount its products below their recommended retail price. Five years after this policy was introduced, Leegin discovered that Kay's Kloset was violating the policy by marking down the Leegin products by 20%. When Kay's refused to comply with Leegin's policy, Leegin cut them off. PSKS, the parent company of Kay's, sued charging that Leegin had violated antitrust laws when it entered into "agreements with retailers to charge only those prices fixed by Leegin." After the district court refused to hear testimony describing the procompetitive effects of Leegin's pricing policy, Leegin appealed seeking to have ''Dr. Miles'' overruled.Judgment
''Dr. Miles'' had become obsolete almost as soon as it was decided; the court started moving away from rigid per se rules in antitrust, both generally, see ''Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, Standard Oil v. United States'' (decided only a month after ''Dr. Miles''), and in the particular area of vertical restraints, see ''United States v. Colgate & Co.'' (1919). After a brief mid-century hiatus in which the court imposed a more social goals-oriented jurisprudence,''United States v. Alcoa'' (2d Cir. 1945), for example, which inveighed that antitrust serve "the helplessness of individual before" "great aggregations of capital" by restricting industry to "small units"; ''see also'' ''United States v. Columbia Steel Co.'', 334 U.S. 495, 535-36 (1948) (Douglas, J., dissenting). the court tacked back to an understanding of antitrust based on economics and allocative efficiency, primarily under the influence of Robert Bork's book ''The Antitrust Paradox''. As this process rolled through cases like ''Continental Television, Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc.'' (1977), ''State Oil Co. v. Khan'' (1997), and ''Verizon Communications Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko, LLP'' (2004), ''Dr. Miles'' became more and more anomalous. In ''Leegin'', the court resolved the tension by overruling ''Dr. Miles''. Citing Bork, Ronald Coase, and others, the Court held that manufacturer-imposed minimum resale prices can lead retailers to compete efficiently for customer sales in ways other than cutting the retail price.See also
* List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 551 * List of United States Supreme Court cases * ''United States v. Apple Inc.'' (S.D.N.Y., 2013)References
Further reading
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