Continental Ore Company v. Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation , 82 S. Ct. 141 ( 1961 )

368 U.S. 886

82 S. Ct. 141

7 L. Ed. 2d 87

CONTINENTAL ORE COMPANY et al., petitioners,
v.
UNION CARBIDE AND CARBON CORPORATION et al.

No. 304.

Supreme Court of the United States

October 23, 1961

Joseph L. Alioto and Maxwell Keith, for petitioners.

1

Herbert W. Clark, Richard J. Archer and Girvan Peck, for respondents Union Carbide Corp. and United States Vanadium Corp.

2

Edward R. Neaher and Francis N. Marshall, for respondent Vanadium Corp. of America.

3

Petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted limited to Questions 2, 5, and 6 presented by the petition which read as follows:

4

'2. Whether an Appellate Court can take away from a jury the question of causal effect concerning an injury by a 100% two-company monopoly (admittedly achieved pursuant to an intent to monopolize) when the question of violation is confessed and the issue of measurement of damages is more than sufficiently supported by relevant economic data and where the destruction of the plaintiff company (petitioners herein) was admitted to be, by a chief executive officer of a defendant, an important goal of the monopolists?

5

'5. Whether petitioners, an American company, can claim damages under the anti-trust laws for injury caused by their elimination from the Canadian market when it was shown that two other American companies had entered into a conspiracy to eliminate all competition and to monopolize the industry and when it is shown that as part of this conspiracy one of the American companies utilized its domination and control over a wholly owned Canadian subsidiary, which had been given a discretionary power by the Canadian government to allocate the importation of vanadium into Canada during the war, to exclude the exports of petitioners (competitors) from entering Canada for sale to petitioners' Canadian customers and when it is shown that the refusal of the Canadian subsidiary to allocate vanadium to petitioners' Canadian customers was directed by its American parent company pursuant to the overall conspiracy to eliminate all competition and specifically to eliminate petitioners. This issue was erroneously decided against petitioners on the Court of Appeals' manifest misapplication of this Court's recent opinion in Eastern Railroad Pres[idents] Conf[erence] v. Noerr Motor Frgt., Inc., 1961, 365 U.S. 127, 81 S. Ct. 523 [5 L. Ed. 2d 464].

6

'6. Whether petitioners, against whom a directed verdict was ordered by the Appellate Court, were deprived of a trial by jury by the Appellate Court below which weighed the evidence, made factual rulings on the sufficiency of evidence of causation, did not view the evidence as a whole, did not allow petitioners the benefit of all their evidence, did not allow petitioners the benefit of all inferences and presumptions to be drawn from the evidence and did not resolve all conflicts in the evidence in favor of petitioners in direct conflict with this Court's opinion in Beacon Theatres, Inc., v. Westover, [1959] 359 U.S. 500 [79 S. Ct. 948, 3 L. Ed. 2d 988].'