IT’S FINALLY OVER

Late on an August afternoon nearly five years ago, Tina Kondo, the chief of the antitrust division for the Attorney General in Washington, received an eighteen page letter from one David Burman, an attorney representing the Costco warehouse club. The letter spoke of how Costco would do business in Washington in the absence of alcohol regulation, and then explained why they felt Washington's alcohol regulations violated the Constitution. That letter sparked nearly five years of the most intense litigation ever