by Brian Wolfman
In a pay-for-delay settlement, a brand-name drug company pays a generic
company that has challenged the brand-name company's patent to stay
out of the market. Some early antitrust challenges to these
settlements succeeded, but later court of appeals' rulings gave them a
green light. Then, as we discussed in this post last July, the Third Circuit sought to apply the
brakes in In re: K-Dur Antitrust Litigation, and demanded serious antitrust scrutiny of those settlements. Earlier, we had posted (here, here, and here) about the FTC's efforts to police pay-for-delay settlements.
Today, the Supreme Court decided to review the issue in a case out of the 11th Circuit brought by the FTC, Federal Trade Commission v. Watson Pharmaceuticals. The cert-stage filings are here.
