Case Citator › Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. United States

Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. United States

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Limited by some courts
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Citation
356 U.S. 1
Decided
Confirmed treatments
1
Flagged citations read
36 of 36
Citing cases (total)
36
Treatment dates
2001
Limited by some courts
At least one reviewed court has limited this case’s holding to narrower facts or a narrower rule. No reviewed court has overruled it. Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. United States has been limited. All 36 flagged citations have been read.
More on how this was screened

The D.C. Circuit confined its rule of automatic illegality for tying arrangements when the products are platform software and complementary software functions; that treatment is listed below. The Supreme Court's underlying tying rule continues to be applied in other settings.

Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

36 later cases cite Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. United States; 36 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

Relying on Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. United States?

This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.

Treatments

Limited

  • The D.C. Circuit held that platform software bundled with complementary software functions requires rule of reason review, instead of Northern Pacific's automatic rule for tying arrangements.

    United States v. Microsoft Corp. · D.C. Circuit · filed

    A court hewing more closely to the truncated analysis contem- plated by Northern Pacific Railway would perhaps have overlooked these consumer benefits. These arguments all point to one conclusion: we cannot comfortably say that bundling in platform software markets has so little "redeeming virtue," N. Pac. Ry., 356 U.S. at 5, and that there would be so "very little loss to society" from its ban, that "an inquiry into its costs in the individual case [can be] considered [ ] unnecessary." Jefferson Parish, 466 U.S. at 33-34 (O'Connor, J., concurring). We do not have enough empirical evidence regarding the effect of Microsoft's practice on the amount of consumer surplus created or con- sumer choice foreclosed by the integration of added function- ality into platform software to exercise sensible judgment regarding that entire class of behavior. (For some issues we have no data.) "We need to know more than we do about the actual impact of these arrangements on competition to decide whether they ... should be classified as per se violations of the Sherman Act." White Motor, 372 U.S. at 263. Until then, we will heed the wisdom that "easy labels do not always supply ready answers," Broad. Music, 441 U.S. at 8, and vacate the District Court's finding of per se tying liability under Sherman Act s 1. We remand the case for evaluation of Microsoft's tying arrangements under the rule of reason.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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