Shutterstock_131159597 (1)Pre-emption? Ha!

A 7-2 split on the U.S. Supreme Court last week revived state-law antitrust claims against natural-gas pipelines. End-user (or retail) customers alleged that the pipelines conspired to rig index prices and thus inflate sales prices. The ruling gave narrow play to the pipelines' "field pre-emption" defense. The Court held that a federal agency's power under the Natural Gas Act to regulate any "practice" that affected wholesale prices to resellers did not pre-empt the claims. ONEOK, Inc. v. LearJet, Inc., No. 13-271 (U.S. Apr. 21, 2015).

The decision plainly will help plaintiffs who bring claims under state law to fend off federal pre-emption defenses. But it may also aid those who bring federal-law claims that defendants contend Congress tacitly pre-empted.

Gas, gas, gas

Under the Natural Gas Act of 1938, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had and has the power to make rules and issue orders relating to some, but hardly all, aspects of the domestic gas industry. FERC's authority has notably included a role in regulating prices that interstate pipelines charge to utilities and other middlemen. But over the years FERC has done less and less of that.

In the 1970s, with prodding from Congress, FERC began to shed its function as the setter of prices that pipelines could pay and charge. Yet FERC remained a hovering presence in the gas industry, although now it mainly aimed to  assure that pipelines didn't garner too much power in individual gas markets.

A flood of sales to wholesale (reseller) and retail (end-user) purchasers ensued. The deluge in turn led to use of more or less local indices as pricing benchmarks. The index price in theory reflected actual, arm's-length transactions, and it often found its way into private contracts as a presumably objective proxy for the market price.

Rigging the market

But reality didn't match the theory or the presumption. People manipulated the indices. As the Court noted, "sometimes those who reported [pricing] information simply fabricated it". ONEOK, slip op. at 7. Other times, it pointed out, parties reported prices from "wash" trades, which had no substance. Id.

FERC had snapped to the manipulation by 2003 — including as the result of the California electricity crisis of 2000-2001. By then, gas prices had more than tripled. Suspecting foul play, several groups of retail buyers sued, alleging a conspiracy to inflate gas prices through (among other means) rigging of price indices. They claimed violation of state antitrust laws only.

Dismissal and reversal

The defendants' having removed the cases to federal court, the district judge (in Nevada) who got all of them granted a motion to dismiss. He held that the NGA pre-empted the "field" and therefore barred antitrust claims that would have the (indirect) effect of regulating wholesale prices of natural gas. The fact that the plaintiffs limited their claims to retail prices, which FERC did not have jurisdiction to regulate, did not matter to the court. The practices in question affected prices at both levels, and the claims "aimed at" entities — interstate pipelines — over which FERC had regulatory jurisdiction and authority.

The Ninth Circuit reversed. The Supreme Court granted review. It affirmed the court of appeals decision.

Issues

The 7-2 majority, with Justice Breyer writing for it, leaned heavily on the fact that Congress left much of the natural-gas industry to state oversight, putting only the interstate transportation part under FERC's suzerainty. "Accordingly," Justice Breyer wrote, "where (as here) a state law can be applied to nonjurisdictional as well as jurisdictional sales, we must proceed cautiously, finding pre-emption only where detailed examination convinces us that a matter falls within the pre-empted field as defined by our precedents." ONEOK, slip op. at 10-11.

That "detailed examination" did not persuade the Court. "Antitrust laws", Justice Breyer noted, "are not aimed at natural-gas companies in particular, but rather all businesses in the marketplace." Id. at 13. Under the Court's precedents, that meant the state-law claims could avoid pre-emption so long as they dealt with conduct that fell at least partly within state authority and did not "aim" to regulate the pipelines as pipelines. Because the retail buyers' lawsuits did not "seek to challenge the background marketplace conditions that affected both jurisdictional and nonjurisdictional rates", the NGA did not pre-empt them under a "field pre-emption" theory. Id. at 15.

Scalia dissent

Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent, which Chief Justice John Roberts joined, painted the pre-emption issue as a simple question of whether Congress gave FERC the sole power to regulate wholesale prices. "Because the Commission's exclusive authority extends to the conduct challenged here," he concluded, "state antitrust regulation of that conduct is preempted." Id. at 3 (Scalia, J., dissenting).

Upshot

ONEOK will have three main effects.

Most obviously, the pro-plaintiff outcome will help LearJet and the other end-users who brought or who will (by way of the class action mechanism) benefit from the litigation. Yet they have miles to go before they sleep. A "conflict pre-emption" attack awaits them upon their return to the district court.

Second, ONEOK will aid other plaintiffs who assert state-law antitrust and other claims that may impinge on the subject matter of federal regulation. Areas include these:

  • telecommunications (some of which the Federal Communications Commission oversees),
  • banking (the Federal Reserve);
  • public trading of securities (the Securities and Exchange Commission);
  • air transportation (Federal Aviation Administration);
  • pharmaceuticals and medical devices (Food and Drug Administration);
  • workplace safety (Occupational Safety and Health Administration); and
  • healthcare (Department of Health and Human Services).

Whether ONEOK makes a difference in a particular context will depend partly on how much leeway Congress left states for regulation of the subject matter and — assuming Congress left some room for state involvement — partly on the result of the "detailed examination" of which Justice Breyer spoke.

Finally, the Court's 7-2 rejection of Justice Scalia's sweeping view of field pre-emption should imply a softening of the Court's "implied repeal" doctrine, which hypothesizes that a "plain repugnancy" between two federal statutes requires that one of the two give way. The Court in Credit Suisse, with Justice Breyer again the author, seemed too quick to find a conflict between securities and antitrust law.** Justice Breyer's more modest approach in ONEOK may help confine Credit Suisse to its facts.

__________________

* See Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC v. Billing, 551 U.S. 264 (2007) (holding that SEC's authority to regulation initial public offerings of stock under federal securities law trumped claim under federal antitrust law that investment banks conspired to rig terms for providing IPO services). 

** See Jesse W. Markham, Jr., The Supreme Court's New Implied Repeal Doctrine: Expanding Judicial Power to Rewrite Legislation Under the Ballooning Conception of "Plain Repugnancy", 45 Gonzaga L. Rev. 437 (2009/10).

 

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Photo of Barry Barnett Barry Barnett

Clients and colleagues call Barry Barnett an “incredibly gifted lawyer” (Chambers and Partners) who is “magic in the courtroom” (Who’s Who Legal), “the top antitrust lawyer in Texas” (Chambers and Partners), and “a person of unquestioned integrity” (David J. Beck, founder of Beck…

Clients and colleagues call Barry Barnett an “incredibly gifted lawyer” (Chambers and Partners) who is “magic in the courtroom” (Who’s Who Legal), “the top antitrust lawyer in Texas” (Chambers and Partners), and “a person of unquestioned integrity” (David J. Beck, founder of Beck Redden).

Barnett is a Fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers, and Lawdragon has named him one of the top 500 lawyers in the United States three years in a row. Best Lawyers in America has honored him as “Lawyer of the Year” for Bet-the-Company Litigation (2019 and 2017) and Patent Litigation (2020) in Houston. Based in Texas and New York, Barnett has tried complex business disputes across the United States.

TRIAL COUNSEL
Barnett’s background, training, and experience make him indispensable to his clients. The small-town son of a Texas roughneck and grandson of a Texas sharecropper, Barnett “developed an unusual common sense about people, their motivations, and their dilemmas,” according to former client Michael Lewis.

Barnett has been historically recognized for his effectiveness and judgment. His peers chose him, for example, to the American College of Trial Lawyers and American Law Institute. His decades of trial and appellate work representing both plaintiffs and defendants have made him a master strategist and nimble tactician in complex disputes.

Barnett focuses on enforcement of antitrust laws, the “Magna Carta of free enterprise,” in Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s memorable phrase. “Barry is one of the nation’s outstanding antitrust lawyers,” according to Joseph Goldberg, a member of the Private Antitrust Enforcement Hall of Fame. Named among Texas’s top ten antitrust lawyers of 2023, Business Today calls Barnett a “trailblazer” among the “distinguished legal minds” who “dedicate their skill and expertise to the maintenance of healthy competition in various sectors” of the Lone Star State’s booming economy. Barnett is also adept in energy and intellectual property matters and has battled for clients against a Who’s Who list of corporate behemoths, including Abbott Labs, Alcoa, Apple, AT&T, BlackBerry, Broadcom, Comcast, Dow, JPMorgan Chase, Samsung, and Visa.

Barnett commands a courtroom with calm and credibility and “is the perfect lawyer for bet the company litigation,” said Scott Regan, General Counsel of former client Whiting Petroleum. His performance before the Supreme Court in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend prompted the Court to withdraw the question on which it had granted review. The judge in a trial involving mobile phone technology called Barnett “one of the best” and that his opening statement the finest he had ever seen. Another trial judge told Barnett minutes after a jury returned a favorable verdict against the county’s biggest employer that he was one of the two best trial lawyers he’d ever come across—adding that the other one was dead.

COMPLETE PACKAGE
A versatile trial lawyer, Barnett knows how to handle a case all the way from strategic pre-suit planning to affirmance on appeal. He’s tried cases to verdict and then briefed and argued them when they went before appellate courts, including the Second, Third, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits, the Supreme Court of Louisiana, and (in the case of Comcast Corp. v. Behrend) the Supreme Court of the United States.

Barnett is a sought-after public speaker, often serving on panels and talking about topics like the trials of antitrust class actions and techniques for streamlining complex litigation. He also comments on trends in commercial litigation and the implications of major rulings for outlets such as NPR, Reuters, Law360, Corporate Counsel, and The Dallas Morning News. He’s even appeared in a Frontline program about underfunding of state pensions, authored chapters on “Fee Arrangements” and “Techniques for Expediting and Streamlining Litigation” (the latter with Steve Susman) in the ABA’s definitive treatise on Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts, 5th, and commented on How Antitrust Enforcers Might Think Like Plaintiffs’ Lawyers.

HARD GRADERS
Clients and other hard graders have praised Barnett for his courtroom skills and legal acumen.

A client in a $100 million oil and gas case, which Barnett’s team won at trial and held on appeal, said Barnett and his team “presented a rare combination of strong legal intellect, common sense about right and wrong, and credibility in the courtroom.” David McCombs at Haynes and Boone said Barnett “has a natural presence that goes over well with juries and judges.”

Even former adversaries give Barnett high marks. Lead opposing counsel in a decade-long antitrust slugfest said “Barry is a highly skilled advocate. He understands what really matters in telling a narrative and does so in a very compelling manner.”

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
Barnett relishes opportunities to collaborate with all kinds of people. At the Center for American and International Law (CAIL), founded by a former prosecutor at Nuremberg in 1947 and headquartered in the Dallas area, he has served on the Executive Committee, co-chaired the committee that produced CAIL’s first-ever strategic plan, supported CAIL’s Institute for Law Enforcement Administration and other development efforts, and proposed formation of a new Institute for Social Justice Law. CAIL’s former President David Beck said “Barry is extremely bright” and is “very well prepared in every lawsuit or professional task he undertakes.”

Barnett is also a Trustee of the New-York Historical Society, a Sterling Fellow at Yale, a member of the Yale University Art Gallery’s Governing Board, a winner of the Class Award for his work on behalf of his college class, and a proud contributor to the Yellow Ribbon Program at Harvard Law. Barnett’s pro bono work includes leading the trial team representing people who are at greatest risk of severe illness and death as a result of being exposed to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 while being detained in the Dallas County jail—work for which he received the NGAN Legal Advocacy Fund RBG Award.

At Susman Godfrey, Barnett has served on the firm’s Executive Committee, Employment Committee, and ad hoc committees on partner compensation, succession of leadership, and revision of the firm’s partnership agreement. He also twice chaired the Practice Development Committee.

KEEPING PERSPECTIVE
Barnett understands that clients face many pressures. Managing the stress is important, especially in matters that take years to resolve. He encourages clients to call him whenever they have a question or concern and to keep the inevitable ups and downs in perspective. He wants them to know that he will do his level best to help them achieve their goals. He also strives to foster trust and to make working with him a pleasure.

Cyrus “Skip” Marter, the General Counsel of Bonanza Creek in Denver and a former Susman Godfrey partner and client, said Barnett is “excellent about communicating with clients in a full and honest manner” and can “negotiate for his clients from a position of strength, because he is not afraid to take a case through a full trial on the merits.” Stacey Doré, the President of Hunt Utility Services and a former client, said that Barnett is “an excellent trial lawyer and the person you want to hire for your bet-the-company cases. He is client focused, responsive, and uniquely savvy about trial and settlement strategy.” A New York colleague said, “Barry is a joy to work with as co-counsel. He tackles complex procedural and factual hurdles capably, efficiently, and without drama.”

PERSONAL
Barnett’s wide-ranging experience and calm, down-to-earth approach enable him to connect with clients, judges, jurors, witnesses, and even opposing counsel. He grew up in Nacogdoches, Texas. He co-captained his high school varsity football team as an All-East Texas middle linebacker while also serving as the Editor of Key Club’s Texas-Oklahoma District, won the Best Typist award, took the History Team to glory, and sang in the East Texas All Region Choir. As Dan Kelly of client Vistra Corp. put it, Barnett is “a great person to be around.”

Barnett is steady and loyal. He has practiced at Susman Godfrey his entire career. He and his wife Nancy live in Dallas and enjoy spending time in Houston and New York. Their daughter works for H-E-B in Houston, and their son is a Haynes and Boone transactions lawyer in Dallas.

As a member of Ivy League championship football teams in his junior and senior years at Yale and a parent of two Yalies, Barnett has no trouble choosing sides for “The Game” in November. And he knows how important fighting all the way to the end is. On his last play from scrimmage, in the waning minutes of The Game on Nov. 22, 1980, he recovered a Crimson fumble.

Yale won, 14-0.