“California law gets to govern California, not the entire country.”
—Zac Morgan, WLF Senior Litigation Counsel

Click here to read WLF’s brief.

(Washington, DC)—Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) and TechFreedom today urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse a federal district court’s effort to give nationwide effect to a California statute: the Unfair Competition Law.

The case, Epic Games v. Apple, arises from a dispute between two market competitors. Epic Games contends that Apple has engaged in anticompetitive conduct that runs afoul of both federal and California law. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed—but only as to Epic Games’s California unfair competition claim. Yet in fashioning an injunction, the district court massively overreached, forcing Apple to comply with California law throughout the United States. As the WLF-TechFreedom brief explains, the Constitution simply does not allow such jurisdictional overreach. Under the country’s system of government, California law cannot override the laws of the other States.

Even worse, California courts have interpreted the state law at issue far more narrowly—in the very context of Epic Games’s dispute with Apple. That means, as a practical matter, that California’s Unfair Competition Law means one (narrow) thing inside California, and an entirely different thing outside California.

As the amicus brief notes, leaving the injunction in place will have perverse and uncontrollable consequences. If the Ninth Circuit “determines that a state law may have implicit nationwide application, why should a state legislature not try to legislate with explicit nationwide aim? Leaving the injunction in place risks just such a race to extraterritoriality, on every issue from antitrust to arbitration.” Rather than risk dismantling the Nation’s carefully constructed system of federal and state jurisdiction, the court should dismantle the district court’s colossal error.