American Motor Specialties Co. v. Federal Trade Commission’s Empirical Analysis
278 F.2d 225 · 1960
Citation profile
18 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 1985
18 federal appellate ·
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Applies 15 U.S.C. § 13 (§ 2 of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914) · 15 U.S.C. § 13B (Sherman Antitrust Act) · 28 U.S.C. § 1732
Relies on Rodriguez v. New York · Automatic Canteen Co. of America v. Federal Trade Commission · Moog Industries, Inc. v. Federal Trade Commission · Achilli v. United States · S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. v. Johnson
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Petitioners of course knew that they, as individual firms, were receiving goods in the same quantities and were served by sellers in the same manner as their competitors, and hence organized themselves into a buying group in order to obtain lower prices than their unorganized competitors. Hence, by the very fact of having combined into a group and having obtained thereby a favorable price differential, they each, under Automatic Canteen, were charged with notice that this price differential they each enjoyed could not be justified. And this knowledge of each of the seventeen individual firms is imputable to the organization of which they were all members. Thus, irrespective of whether the buying groups' efforts to bargain with the various manufacturers constituted an improper inducement under Section 2 (f), we hold that the Commission introduced sufficient evidence to fulfill the requirements of Automatic Canteen when it showed that petitioners knowingly received preferential price treatment of such a nature as to violate Section 2.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““Absent a cost justification for volume discounts, or a competitive situation not of the seller’s own making, or other exceptions to the basic theory of the Section, a seller under Section 2(a) of the amended Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C.A. § 13 (a) may not charge discriminating prices based upon the volume of the buyer’s purchases.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.