This case is not a close call.
Like many states, California excessively regulates beer distribution through a complicated and largely rent-imposing three-tier regulatory scheme that governs the relationships between brewers, wholesale distributors, and retailers. Here, a Distributor whose contract was terminated when a Brewer changed hands seeks compensation from a Brewer under that scheme.
Brewer filed an anti-SLAPP motion, based on the idea that the distributorship agreement required some degree of negotiation and potentially arbitration in the interests of resolving a dispute. But that doesn’t make any damn sense. Even if the contract anticipates those procedures, the point of Distributor’s claim is that because Brewer cancelled the contract, Distributor is entitled to compensation under the regulatory scheme.
As articulated by the Supreme Court in Park, Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16(b)(1)’s “arising from protected activity” requires that the elements of the claim constitute First Amendment-type activity. The court here sums up Park pretty well:
[W]here a plaintiff’s claim is based upon an action or decision of the defendant, it is not enough that some protected activity by the defendant precedes that action or decision, that some protected activity is the means of communicating that action or decision, or that some protected activity constitutes evidence of that action or decision. To fall under the anti-SLAPP statute, the challenged action or decision itself must be protected activity.Here, that standard is nowhere close to met. The case is about cancelling a contract for beer distribution. There’s nothing remotely expressive about that.
Affirmed.
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