In 1942, at the request of the Attorney General of Missouri (whose insurance regulators felt powerless to correct abuses they had identified since 1922), the Department of Justice investigated and a grand jury in Georgia indicted the South-Eastern Underwriters Association, 27 of its officers and 198 member companies. The indictment charged the defendants with two counts of antitrust violations: (1) conspiracy under Section 1 of the Sherman Act to fix the premium rates on certain fire insurance policies and boycott non-complying independent sales agencies that did not comply; and (2) monopolization of markets for the sale of fire insurance policies in the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The district court sustained the defendants' demurrer and dismissed the indictment, holding that "the business of insurance is not commerce, either intrastate or interstate" and that it "is not interstate commerce or interstate trade, though it might be considered a trade subject to local laws either State or Federal, where the commerce clause is not the authority relied upon." In January 1955 the Supreme Court heard arguments on the prosecutors' appeal from the district court.