Cockiness, overconfidence, pomposity. Call it what you will. Blawgletter bets you’ll agree that it often gets people in trouble.
The National Football League put its high opinion of itself on display before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. It didn’t look pretty.
The League argued that its member teams couldn’t, as a matter of antitrust law, conspire with each other because they functioned as a single entity for purposes of producing and promoting professional football games. Their legal inability to conspire under Sherman Act section 1, they urged, immunized their agreement not to compete for sales of team logo caps from liability. Their Honors seemed doubtful that calling yourself a single entity makes it so. Transcript of Oral Argument, Am. Needle, Inc. v. Nat’l Football League , No. 08-661 (U.S. Jan. 13, 2010).