Shames v. Hertz

In this case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that California’s Travel and Tourism Commission, a quasi-governmental body dominated by representatives of tourism-related industries, was immune from antitrust scrutiny in a case alleging that the Commission had been used by the rental car industry to implement a horizontal price-fixing conspiracy. The plaintiffs petitioned for rehearing, arguing that the court had wrongly interpreted the scope of “state action” antitrust immunity to cover activity that did not reflect an articulated state policy of displacing competition and was not actively supervised by the state. Public Citizen filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the rehearing request. The petition for rehearing was denied.