DOJ Urges Relatively Narrow Reading of Rail Antitrust Exclusion

The Justice Department weighed in on a multidistrict price-fixing case against the country’s top freight railroads in D.C. federal court, arguing that the railroads are overstating the impact of a federal law making certain rate communications inadmissible as antitrust evidence.

Their “expansive” proposed reading of the Staggers Act provision “would exclude critical evidence of antitrust violations, giving carriers greater protection from the antitrust laws as their schemes become more complex and multifaceted,” the government says in a statement of interest filed Tuesday.

That would effectively “foreclose antitrust recovery in all but the unusual case where plaintiffs are somehow able to ...