WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out a proposed class-action antitrust lawsuit against Comcast, the nation’s largest cable television company, in which a group of more than two million current and former Comcast subscribers sought to prove that the company had unfairly eliminated competition and overcharged customers.
In a 5-to-4 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court said that the proposed class of Comcast subscribers failed to meet formal legal guidelines for how to certify that evidence of wrongdoing was common to the group and that damages could be measured on a classwide, rather than an individual, basis.
The decision evoked a harsh dissent, however, written jointly by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, that accused the majority of focusing on an issue other than that on which the court had agreed to hear the case. They said the court should not have heard the case.
The majority created a ruling that “is good for this day and case only,” the dissenting justices wrote, and “sets forth a profoundly mistaken view of antitrust law.”
Neither Comcast nor its subscribers had the chance to make their cases as to whether the company engaged in anticompetitive practices, established a monopoly or overcharged customers. The plaintiffs accused Comcast of creating a monopoly by buying cable groups in the Philadelphia area that gave it 69 percent of that market in 2007, up from 24 percent in 1998.
The Supreme Court majority said that the appeals court should have dismissed the case because the group that brought the lawsuit was not cohesive enough to have suffered measurable, common damages. The case was Comcast v. Behrend, No. 11-864.
The majority noted that only one of the plaintiffs’ four theories of antitrust violations were upheld by the Federal District Court. But, the justices said, the subscribers did not present any evidence showing what damages resulted from that action alone.
Comcast said in a statement: “We are pleased that the Supreme Court found that a class should not have been certified in this case.”
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, from which the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, said earlier that it could not answer the question about whether there was enough evidence of illegal conduct to warrant a class action. Such a decision would require it to rule on the facts of the case, the lower appellate court said, rather than on the law that governs when a class action may proceed.
Justice Scalia dismissed that argument. He was joined in the decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
The dissenting justices also said the case should have been dismissed. Justices Ginsburg and Breyer wrote that the case was “hardly fit for our consideration” and should never have been granted a hearing.
The majority also pulled a bait-and-switch, the dissenters said. When the case was argued, they wrote, the majority asked the lawyers to focus on the cohesiveness of the class rather than on the question that the court initially said it wanted to decide — whether the plaintiff class had introduced admissible evidence.