Seven Lesser-Known Antitrust Exemptions And Immunities

There are a number of exemptions to and immunities from the federal antitrust laws. Some are well known, and we have written about many of them before. Jarod Bona catalogued the big ones—state-action immunity, the filed-rate doctrine, the insurance exemption under the McCarran-Ferguson Act, the baseball exemption, the Capper-Volstead Act for agricultural cooperatives, Noerr-Pennington, the statutory and non-statutory labor exemptions, implied immunity, export trade exemptions, foreign sovereign doctrines, the FTAIA, and primary jurisdiction.

Maybe you knew about the baseball exemption. But did you know about the Coca-Cola exemption? How about the Sports Broadcasting exemption? As you might expect, Congress has carved out various immunities and exemptions—often to serve a particularly powerful constituency—and Coca-Cola (and its bottlers) and the National Football League top the list for firms that hold enough cultural sway and political capital to obtain an antitrust golden ticket.