In a 31-page ruling issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Anne R. Traum said the Sun was “clearly likely” to show that the newspapers’ 1989 joint operating agreement remains valid and enforceable. She also found the Sun likely to prove that the Review-Journal violated federal antitrust law and sought to monopolize the Las Vegas daily newspaper market.

The ruling does not restore the Sun to print. The Review-Journal stopped producing and distributing it in April. Traum said the Sun had not met the demanding legal standard for an interim order: financial losses could be addressed at trial, and readers going without their preferred newspaper did not establish the kind of irreparable harm required. She acknowledged that readers “must go without their preferred newspaper until at least the end of this litigation.”

The Sun had asked the court to require the Review-Journal to follow the 1989 agreement and prevent it from ending the joint operation before 2040. Sun attorney Kristen Martini said the ruling allows the claims to proceed to trial, where the newspaper seeks accountability for what it calls anticompetitive conduct.

A central issue is whether the original agreement survived a 2005 amendment. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals previously found that amendment illegal because it lacked the U.S. attorney general’s signature. Traum noted that the attorney general had approved the 1989 agreement, and rejected the Review-Journal’s arguments that the original pact had been abandoned, had become impossible to perform or had been replaced.

The Review-Journal argued that the agreement could no longer be followed because there is no afternoon Sun, no market for one and the costs of printing and delivery make the arrangement unworkable. Traum wrote that this amounted to an argument that compliance would be unprofitable, which does not by itself invalidate a contract. She also concluded that the 2005 document amended the original agreement rather than replacing it. When the amendment was invalidated, she wrote, the 1989 agreement likely returned in its original form.

On the antitrust claims, Traum relied on testimony from the Sun’s experts in economics and the newspaper industry. She found that the Review-Journal holds a large share of the relevant market — daily English-language print newspapers in the Las Vegas area — and that significant barriers make it difficult for competitors to enter. She rejected the Review-Journal’s argument that online news operations should be included in that market, saying it had not shown why the internet should be treated differently from other media that have competed with newspapers.

The judge also cited evidence that the Review-Journal intentionally drove profits from the joint operation to zero and did not promote the Sun in its advertising or on its front page. The Sun presented evidence, she wrote, that the Review-Journal stopped a longstanding course of dealing and accepted short-term losses “in order to harm the Sun and obtain longer-term market dominance.” These are preliminary findings; the lawsuit has not yet gone to trial.

The newspapers combined business operations in 1989 under the federal Newspaper Preservation Act, which allows some newspapers to share business functions while maintaining independent newsrooms and editorial pages. Under the agreement, the Review-Journal published in the morning and the Sun in the afternoon, with a joint edition on weekends and holidays. The agreement was intended to last at least 50 years.

In 2005, the Sun stopped publishing an afternoon paper and became an insert in the Review-Journal’s morning edition. The papers also changed their profit-sharing formula. The Sun’s lawsuit, filed in 2019, alleged that after the Adelson family bought the Review-Journal in 2015, the new ownership pursued a financial plan that reduced the Sun’s payments. The joint operation first recorded losses in 2017, according to the ruling, and the Sun has not received a regular payment under the agreement since.

The dispute has also involved accounting. An arbitrator awarded the Sun more than $1.8 million in 2019 over the Review-Journal’s accounting of editorial and promotional costs, and the Nevada Supreme Court upheld that award.