Pending before the Supreme Court for its conference last Friday was a request for certiorari in the recent Sixth Circuit case of Dean Foods Company v. Food Lion, LLC. In an order issued today, the Supreme Court denied certiorari and allowed the decision to stand without further comment.
Dean Foods (also known as In re Southeastern Milk Antitrust Litigation), which we covered here, was notable for its application of Daubert in the antitrust context. In Dean, after a careful scrutiny of the record and proceedings below, the Sixth Circuit held that the district court improperly excluded the plaintiffs’ expert testimony, and thus that it also improperly concluded that that the plaintiffs failed to establish causation as part of their showing of antitrust injury. Dean appealed to the Supreme Court for a decision on the standard for antitrust plaintiffs’ production of evidence of causation in order to defeat a motion for summary judgment. However, the Court has declined to take up this issue, allowing the case to move forward in district court again under the Sixth Circuit’s standards.
