Gregory v. Fort Bridger Rendezvous Ass'n

448 F.3d 1195, 2006 U.S. App. LEXIS 12769, 2006 WL 1401627
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
DecidedMay 23, 2006
Docket04-8100
StatusPublished
Cited by15 cases

This text of 448 F.3d 1195 (Gregory v. Fort Bridger Rendezvous Ass'n) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Gregory v. Fort Bridger Rendezvous Ass'n, 448 F.3d 1195, 2006 U.S. App. LEXIS 12769, 2006 WL 1401627 (10th Cir. 2006).

Opinion

TACHA, Chief Circuit Judge.

This appeal arises from an action brought by Plaintiffs-Appellants Richard and Sandy Gregory against Defendant-Appellee Fort Bridger Rendezvous Association (“FBRA”). The Gregorys allege that the FBRA engaged in a horizontal group boycott by refusing to permit them to sell their goods at the Fort Bridger Rendezvous (“Rendezvous”) in violation of § 1 of the Sherman Act. See 15 U.S.C. § 1. Based on the same conduct, the Gregorys also allege that the FBRA conspired to monopolize sales in violation of § 2 of the Sherman Act. See 15 U.S.C. § 2. The District Court granted summary judgment for the FBRA on both claims. We take jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and AFFIRM.

I. BACKGROUND

The Rendezvous is a historical reenactment held each Labor Day weekend at the Fort Bridger Historical Site in Wyoming in which participants reenact an annual rendezvous held by local fur traders from 1825 to 1840. The weekend boasts competitions in shooting, archery, and knife-throwing contests, and, relevant to this appeal, hosts “traders” who sell accurate replicas of pre-1840 goods. The event attracts between 40,000 — 50,000 visitors and is the largest of its kind in the region.

The State of Wyoming granted the FBRA, a nonprofit volunteer organization, the exclusive right to conduct the Rendezvous. The FBRA has approximately ninety members, a majority of whom trade at the Rendezvous. Some of the members of the FBRA’s fourteen-person Board of Directors are also traders. One need not be a member of the FBRA to trade at the Rendezvous, however, as fewer than half of the traders are members of the FBRA.

Among other things, the FBRA monitors traders’ wares for authenticity and assigns to traders the limited number of trading spaces allowed by its state permit. *1198 Under the FBRA’s method of assigning spaces, priority is given to traders who participated in the previous year’s Rendezvous. In this way, if a trader files a timely application for space, he generally will receive the same space he occupied the year before. Applications received by traders who did not trade at the previous Rendezvous, or by traders who were at the previous Rendezvous but filed their applications after the deadline, are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Although not members of the FBRA, the Gregorys were long-time and large-volume Rendezvous traders who offered a wide selection of goods at low prices as compared to most other traders — including traders who were members and directors of the FBRA. Due to their seniority, the Gregorys had obtained two coveted trading spaces on the front row of the event, which they maintained by making a timely application every year to the following year’s Rendezvous.

In addition to selling their replica pre-1840 goods at the Rendezvous, the Grego-rys also sold them at a trading post located on the grounds of the Fort Bridger Historical Site. Their trading-post sales of goods were governed by a contract with the State of Wyoming rather than by the FBRA, however, and were therefore not subject to the FBRA’s standards of authenticity. 1 Nonetheless, the Gregorys sold many of the same goods at the trading post that they offered for sale at the Rendezvous. Additionally, the Gregorys have attended and sold their goods at twenty-five similar events in other parts of the country.

According to the Gregorys, in the late 1990s the FBRA launched an anticompeti-tive campaign against them. The Grego-rys complain of the following conduct: (1) the Board, acting through a “trade committee,” forced the Gregorys to stop selling “unauthentic goods,” while other traders, including Board members, continued selling identical goods; 2 (2) the Board removed the camping spaces next to the Gregorys’ trading space (which the Grego-rys used for storage instead of camping) and created another trading space; (3) the Board voted to allow a trader only one space on the front row; 3 (4) the Board proposed to auction off the Gregorys’ commercially advantageous trading area that they earned by seniority, while no other spaces became the subject of a proposed auction; and (5) the Board proposed severely limiting the range of merchandise permitted under the replica pre-1840 standard, which would have adversely affected large-volume traders like the Gregorys. 4

*1199 In response to these actions taken by the Board, Sandy Gregory initiated her own course of conduct against the FBRA. She wrote several letters to the Board, complaining of its proposals and of “personal grudges” that some directors had against them. She also wrote to the State of Wyoming and accused the FBRA directors of gross mismanagement, embezzlement, permit violations, and ethics violations. She asked for more state involvement and control over the FBRA and requested that the State keep her communications confidential. Ms. Gregory also secretly recorded a traders’ meeting at the 2000 Rendezvous and several telephone conversations between her husband and Kash Johnson, Chairman of the Rendezvous and a director of the FBRA. She then wrote a letter to Mr. Johnson accusing him of being unethical, unprofessional, and “twisted with irrational anger.”

Subsequently, the State of Wyoming instructed Mr. Johnson not to respond to future complaints from Ms. Gregory. As a result of this instruction, when the Grego-rys sent their application to the FBRA in 2002 by registered mail, it was returned to them unopened. When Mr. Gregory asked Mr. Johnson why their application was returned, Mr. Johnson acknowledged that he had not realized that the returned letter was their application. Mr. Johnson told Mr. Gregory that if he resent it, it would be accepted. After the Gregorys reapplied and their application was accepted, however, the Board voted unanimously to reject the Gregorys’ application for trading space at the 2002 Rendezvous and returned their application fee because of their “animosity and pattern of personal and professional attacks made upon the Board in their correspondence to both the Board members and the State of Wyoming.” 5 As a result, the Gregorys were not permitted to trade at the Rendezvous in 2002. 6 The Gregorys contend that their ouster was orchestrated to eliminate competition and that the reason proffered by the FBRA — Ms. Gregory’s unruly behavior — is pretextual.

The Gregorys filed suit against the FBRA, alleging violations of §§ 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of the FBRA after finding that the Gregorys failed to show a plurality of actors necessary to establish concerted action or a conspiracy as required by those provisions. This appeal followed.

II. DISCUSSION

A.

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Bluebook (online)
448 F.3d 1195, 2006 U.S. App. LEXIS 12769, 2006 WL 1401627, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/gregory-v-fort-bridger-rendezvous-assn-ca10-2006.