Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc.

Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc.
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 26, 2011 Decided June 27, 2011
Full case name	Sorrell, Attorney General of Vermont, et al. v . IMS Health Inc. et al.
Docket nos.	10-779
Citations	564 U.S. 552 (more) 131 S.Ct. 2653 (2011)
Argument	Oral argument
Prior history	Judgement for defendants, 631 F. Supp. 2d 434 (D. Vt. 2009); reversed and remanded, 630 F. 3d 263 (2nd Cir. 2010); certiorari granted, 562 U.S. 1127 (2011)
Holding
A Vermont statute that restricted the sale, disclosure, and use of records that revealed the prescribing practices of individual doctors violated the First Amendment.
Court membership
Case opinions
Majority	Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor
Dissent	Breyer, joined by Ginsburg, Kagan
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. I

Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564 U.S. 552 (2011), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a Vermont statute that restricted the sale, disclosure, and use of records that revealed the prescribing practices of individual doctors violated the First Amendment.

In 2007, Vermont passed the Prescription Confidentiality Law which required among other things that records containing a doctor's prescribing practices not be sold or used for marketing purposes unless the doctor consented. The law was a response to a Vermont Medical Society resolution stating that using the prescribing history of doctors in marketing was an intrusion into the way doctors practice medicine. The Vermont Medical Society had found that the marketing efforts of pharmaceutical companies used in large part the data of individual doctors' prescribing patterns, sold to the companies by pharmacies without the doctors' consent and successfully lobbied the Vermont legislature to enact the law.

Data mining companies and pharmaceutical manufactures contended that the law violated their First Amendment rights and sought declaratory and injunctive relief against Vermont officials. The United States District Court for the District of Vermont denied relief; the plaintiffs appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which reversed, holding that the law violated the First Amendment by restricting the speech of the companies without adequate justification. Vermont's Attorney General appealed to the The Supreme Court, which granted certiorari to resolve the contradiction of a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which had overturned similar laws in New Hampshire and Maine, concluding that the laws regulated economic conduct. not commercial speech.

Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court, which Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, and Justice Sotomayor joined. The Court held that the law violated the First Amendment and affirmed the judgment of the Court of Appeals.