Three medical students who accused the Association of American Medical Colleges and other groups of violating antitrust law in how they assigned medical residents to teaching hospitals have lost at another stage of the judicial pyramid. In a unanimous ruling made last week but not released until Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, which had sought class-action status on behalf of hundreds of thousands of past medical students, asserted that the National Resident Matching Program forced residents to accept positions that paid little, worked them to exhaustion, and endangered patients (The Chronicle, May 8, 2002). If it had succeeded, the lawsuit could have forced the hospitals to cough up millions of dollars in back pay, and would have forced the abandonment of the 54-year-old matching program.

In early 2004, however, the defendants in the case persuaded Congress to pass, and President Bush to sign, legislation specifically exempting the matching program from being used as evidence to support an antitrust claim (The Chronicle, April 13, 2004). The measure was inserted in the middle of a vast bill dealing with corporate pension funds.

Four months later, a federal district judge cited that law in a decision that dismissed the lawsuit (The Chronicle, August 17, 2004) “with prejudice,” which means the case cannot be relitigated.

The appeals court upheld that ruling last week. Its four-page decision was issued “per curiam,” which generally means that the judges consider the case so noncontroversial that they need not sign the ruling individually.