Antitrust Appeals Set to Test Trial-Court Wins in 2026

On April 17, 2026, a federal judge in the Eastern District of California entered a preliminary injunction barring Nexstar Media Group from consolidating or integrating its newly acquired subsidiary Tegna Inc. pending a final ruling on the merits of an antitrust challenge brought by a coalition of state attorneys general. The order, issued from the Sacramento courthouse of the Robert T. Matsui Federal Building, froze a $6.2 billion transaction that would have created the largest owner of local broadcast television stations in the United States. Nexstar's response, filed within days, was four words: "We will appeal."

The appeal, lodged with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, triggers a distinct procedural track: interlocutory review of a preliminary injunction under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1). That statute permits immediate appeal from orders granting or denying injunctive relief, a carve-out from the usual final-judgment rule that governs most federal appellate litigation. In antitrust, where the gap between a preliminary injunction and a final merits ruling can span years, the interlocutory appeal is frequently the case. As the May 2026 edition of DLA Piper's Inside Competition noted in its roundup of key developments, the Nexstar ruling landed in the same window as a series of enforcement actions that underscore "the increasingly active role of state AGs in merger enforcement."

The appellate path now confronting Nexstar is not unique to the broadcast sector. Across the dockets of the circuits, three structurally significant antitrust matters are climbing toward appellate disposition simultaneously. In the Southern District of New York, the Live Nation Entertainment trial produced a jury verdict finding that the company and its Ticketmaster subsidiary illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market. Post-trial motions are underway, and both sides have signaled that the case will reach the Second Circuit. In the D.C. District, Judge Amit Mehta denied Google's motion to stay a remedies order in the government's search-antitrust case, as Law.com reported on May 8. Google's appeal of that denial is proceeding in parallel with its broader challenge to the liability finding.

What distinguishes the Nexstar appeal from the Live Nation and Google proceedings is its posture. A preliminary injunction is reviewed under the abuse-of-discretion standard, and appellate courts typically defer to the district court's assessment of the four traditional factors: likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, the balance of equities, and the public interest. But that deference is not absolute. The Ninth Circuit has reversed preliminary injunctions in antitrust merger cases when it found that the district court applied an incorrect legal standard or made clearly erroneous factual findings.

The cause of action in the Nexstar case arises under Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which prohibits acquisitions whose effect "may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly." The state AG coalition, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and now numbering thirteen states after five additional attorneys general joined the suit, as TV Technology reported on May 1, alleges that the combined entity would control an outsized share of the local broadcast advertising market and would possess the leverage to raise retransmission fees charged to distributors such as DirecTV. The relief sought is permanent divestiture: unwinding the transaction entirely.

Nexstar's defense, as framed in its notice of appeal and previewed in district court filings, rests on two propositions. First, that the relevant geographic market definition employed by the plaintiffs is artificially narrow, ignoring the competitive pressure exerted by digital advertising platforms and streaming services. Second, that the preliminary injunction itself constitutes irreparable harm to Nexstar and Tegna shareholders, because deal-contingent financing arrangements and integration planning cannot survive an extended freeze. The Recorder characterized the company's position succinctly: Nexstar is arguing that the alternative to the deal is, in effect, "the demise of your local broadcast station."

"We will appeal. The court's ruling ignores the competitive realities of the modern media marketplace and substitutes the preferences of a coalition of state attorneys general for the judgment of the market.", Nexstar Media Group Inc. statement, as quoted by The Recorder, April 20, 2026

The appellate panel that will hear Nexstar's challenge has not yet been assigned, but the Ninth Circuit's composition matters enormously. The court has twenty-nine active judgeships, and the draw from that pool will determine whether the panel leans toward the circuit's reputation for skepticism of concentrated corporate power or its more recent cohort of judges who have expressed concern about the breadth of state antitrust enforcement. The swing vote, as in many Ninth Circuit antitrust appeals, is likely to be whichever judge occupies the middle seat.

Meanwhile, the Live Nation appeal presents a different procedural architecture. After a jury found liability on claims brought by the Department of Justice and thirty-four states, the company faces the prospect of structural remedies including the separation of its concert-promotion business from Ticketmaster. The appeal, once perfected, will reach the Second Circuit, which reviews jury verdicts under a standard that asks whether a reasonable jury could have reached the conclusion it did, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prevailing party. That is a high bar for an appellant to clear.

Jeffrey Kessler of Winston & Strawn, who represented the plaintiffs in the Live Nation trial, appeared before the Second Circuit in an unrelated antitrust matter in late April, as the New York Law Journal reported, arguing that a district court mishandled a defunct soccer league's antitrust case. The appearance, while concerning a different dispute, offered a preview of the appellate arguments that will shape the Live Nation appeal: questions about market definition, the scope of antitrust injury, and the appropriate standard for proving monopoly power under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

The Google remedies order adds yet another appellate dimension. Judge Mehta's denial of a stay means that the behavioral and structural remedies ordered after the liability finding took effect while Google's appeal is pending. Google argued before the district court that compliance with certain disclosure requirements would cause irreparable competitive harm. Judge Mehta was unpersuaded, writing that "there is no rule in this circuit that any disclosure of information is an irreparable harm sufficient to warrant a stay." The D.C. Circuit will now be asked to review that determination under the familiar four-factor test for stays pending appeal, with the added complication that the remedies are already operative.

For the Nexstar parties, the timeline is compressed. The Ninth Circuit's interlocutory appeal docket typically moves faster than its merits docket. Briefing schedules in preliminary-injunction appeals are often set within sixty days of the notice of appeal, with oral argument calendared within three to six months thereafter. A decision could arrive before the end of 2026. That timeline matters because the underlying antitrust trial in the Eastern District of California is not expected to commence until mid-2027 at the earliest. If the Ninth Circuit affirms the preliminary injunction, the deal will have been frozen for over a year before any trial on the merits begins, placing enormous pressure on the parties to settle.

The settlement dynamic is not lost on the state AGs. The coalition now includes both Democratic and Republican attorneys general, a bipartisan configuration that complicates Nexstar's political narrative. The JD Supra analysis by Vinson & Elkins observed that state AGs "secured two significant victories that underscore their important role as enforcers of federal antitrust law" in a single week, pointing to the Nexstar preliminary injunction and a separate consumer-protection ruling. The bipartisan expansion, the firm noted, "makes these cases harder to dismiss as partisan overreach."

The appellate map for antitrust in 2026 is crowded. The Nexstar appeal will test whether a district court's market-definition analysis survives interlocutory review when the merging parties argue that digital competitors have been improperly excluded. The Live Nation appeal will test whether a jury verdict grounded in behavioral evidence of monopoly maintenance can support structural separation as a remedy. The Google stay appeal will test the D.C. Circuit's appetite for letting remedies run while liability appeals proceed. Each case turns on a different procedural mechanism, a different standard of review, and a different circuit's precedent.

What the circuits care about

Across the circuits, three questions recur in antitrust appeals with enough regularity that experienced practitioners treat them as the checklist. First: did the district court correctly define the relevant product and geographic markets, or did it commit the analytical error of assuming the conclusion? Market definition is the single most common point of reversal in antitrust appeals. Second: did the court properly apply the burden-shifting framework, or did it require the defendant to disprove anticompetitive effects prematurely? And third, in injunction cases: did the court adequately weigh the irreparable-harm showing on both sides, or did it treat the government's harm as presumptive? The Ninth Circuit has been particularly attentive to the third question in recent merger appeals.

The Nexstar panel will likely focus on the market-definition question first. The state AGs defined the relevant market as local broadcast television advertising in specific designated market areas where Nexstar and Tegna stations overlap. Nexstar argues that this definition excludes digital advertising, which competes directly for the same local ad dollars. Whether the Ninth Circuit considers that argument an invitation to reweigh evidence, which it cannot do on interlocutory review, or a challenge to the legal framework the district court applied, which it can, will determine much about the appeal's trajectory.

The Live Nation appeal will face a different analytical sequence in the Second Circuit. Because the case went to a jury, the factual record is effectively fixed on appeal. Live Nation's strongest arguments are legal: that the district court's jury instructions misstated the elements of a Section 2 monopolization claim, or that the plaintiffs failed to introduce evidence from which a reasonable jury could find monopoly power in a properly defined market. The Second Circuit has reversed antitrust jury verdicts on both grounds in the past decade, but the standard is demanding. Live Nation must show that no reasonable jury could have reached the verdict, not merely that a different jury might have.

Google's stay appeal before the D.C. Circuit raises a question that has divided the circuits: how much weight should a court of appeals give to the district court's assessment of irreparable harm when the alleged harm flows from compliance with an ongoing remedies order? The D.C. Circuit's precedent suggests that the movant must make a strong showing of likely success on the merits of the underlying appeal to obtain a stay, but the precise threshold remains the subject of intra-circuit debate. Judge Mehta's order quoted circuit precedent to the effect that disclosure alone is rarely irreparable, but Google's argument is that the specific disclosures required in the remedies order go to the heart of its competitive strategy and cannot be clawed back once made.

The timing of these appeals will not be synchronized, but their cumulative effect on antitrust enforcement will be felt by the end of 2027. If the Ninth Circuit affirms the Nexstar injunction, state AGs will have a powerful precedent for using preliminary-injunction motions to block mergers without waiting for a full trial. If the Second Circuit upholds the Live Nation verdict, the structural-separation remedy will become a live option in future monopolization cases. If the D.C. Circuit denies Google's stay and later affirms the underlying liability finding, the remedies order will serve as a template for the next generation of antitrust enforcement against technology platforms.

The appellate path is not a detour from the main event. In antitrust, it is the main event. The district-court proceedings that capture headlines are, more often than not, a prelude to the panel that will decide whether the judgment stands. For the parties to these three cases, and for the enforcement agencies and state AGs watching from the wings, the next eighteen months of appellate argument will determine whether the aggressive antitrust enforcement of the mid-2020s survives the scrutiny of the courts that have the final word.