Law Commons^™

Ip And Antitrust: Reformation And Harm, Christina Bohannan, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Antitrust and intellectual property law both seek to improve economic welfare by facilitating competition and investment in innovation. At various times both antitrust and IP law have wandered off this course and have become more driven by special interests. Today, antitrust and IP are on very different roads to reform. Antitrust reform began in the late 1970s with a series of Supreme Court decisions that linked the plaintiff’s harm and right to obtain a remedy to the competition - furthering goals of antitrust policy. Today, patent law has begun its own reform journey, but it is in a much earlier …

The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The Neal Report, which was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson and published in 1967, is rightfully criticized for representing the past rather than the future of antitrust. Its authors completely embraced a theory of competition and industrial organization that had dominated American economic thinking for forty years, but was just in the process of coming to an end. The structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) paradigm that the Neal Report embodied had in fact been one of the most elegant and most tested theories of industrial organization. The theory represented the high point of structuralism in industrial organization economics, resting on the proposition that certain …

The Viability Of Antitrust Price Squeeze Claims, Erik Hovenkamp, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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A price squeeze occurs when a vertically integrated firm "squeezes' a rival's margins between a high wholesale price for an essential input sold to the rival, and a low output price to consumers for whom the two firms compete. Price squeezes have been a recognized but controversial antitrust violation for two-thirds of a century. We examine the law and economics of the price squeeze, beginning with Judge Hand's famous discussion in the Alcoa case in 1945. While Alcoa has been widely portrayed as creating a "fairness" or "fair profit" test for unlawful price squeezes, Judge Hand actually adopted a cost-based …

United States Competition Policy In Crisis: 1890-1955, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The development of marginalist, or neoclassical, economics led to a fifty-year long crisis in competition theory. Given an industrial structure with sufficient fixed costs, competition always became "ruinous," forcing firms to cut prices to marginal cost without sufficient revenue remaining to pay off investment. Early neoclassicists such as Alfred Marshall were not able to solve this problem, and as a result many economists were hostile toward the antitrust laws in the early decades of the twentieth century. The ruinous competition debate came to an abrupt end in the early 1930's, when Joan Robinson and particularly Edward Chamberlin developed models that …

The Intellectual Property-Antitrust Interface, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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This historical overview examines the relationship between antitrust policy and intellectual property in the United States since 1890. Over most of this history, judges imagined far greater conflicts between antitrust policy and intellectual property rights than actually existed, or else relied on sweeping generalizations rather than close analysis. For example, they often assumed that the presence of an intellectual property right led to anticompetitive effects where there was no basis for finding any injury to competition at all. At the other extreme, they often concluded that an intellectual property right immunized seriously anticompetitive conduct even when the intellectual property statute …

Ip And Antitrust Policy: A Brief Historical Overview, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The history of IP/antitrust litigation is filled with exaggerated notions of the power conferred by IP rights and imagined threats to competition. The result is that antitrust litigation involving IP practices has seen problems where none existed. To be sure, finding the right balance between maintaining competition and creating incentives to innovate is no easy task. However, the judge in an IP/antitrust case almost never needs to do the balancing, most of which is done in the language of the IP provisions. The role of antitrust tribunals is the much more limited one of ensuring that any alleged threat to …

Professor Waller's Un-American Approach To Antitrust, Robert H. Lande

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Professor Waller asks an un-American question - what can the United States antitrust program learn from the rest of the world? This question is un-American because we in the United States rarely look to others for advice. Besides, we invented antitrust and we were practically alone in the world in enforcing antitrust for almost a century. Only during the current generation have many other nations had active and vigorous antitrust programs. Moreover, the United States is in the business of exporting our accumulated century of antitrust wisdom through a wide variety of methods, and we revel in playing this role. …

The Factional Foundations Of Competition Policy In America 1888-1992, James May

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The States In The First Century Of The Sherman Act And The Larger Picture Of Antitrust History, James May

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Historical Analysis In Antitrust Law, James May

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Antitrust In The Formative Era: Political And Economic Theory In Constitutional And Antitrust Analysis, 1880-1918, James May

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Antitrust Movement And The Rise Of Industrial Organization, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The modern science of industrial organization grew out of a debate among lawyers and economists in the waning years of the nineteenth century. For Americans, the emergent business "trust" provoked a dialogue about how the law should respond. Many of the formal theories of industrial organization, such as the ruinous competition doctrine, the potential competition doctrine, and the post-classical concern about vertical integration, were actually borrowed from the law.

Anglo-American and European economists disputed the proper domain of theory and description in economic analysis. The British approach was exemplified Alfred and Mary Paley Marshall's Economics of Industry, published in …

A Framework For Evaluating The Antitrust Legacy Of The Reagan Administration, Robert H. Lande

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No abstract provided.

Antitrust Practice And Procedure In The Formative Era: The Constitutional And Conceptual Reach Of State Antitrust Law, 1880-1918, James May

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The End Of Antitrust—Or A New Beginning?, Joe Sims, Robert H. Lande

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Antitrust is in one of its periodic states of decline. Historically, it has rebounded from these valleys to rise to even higher peaks of enthusiastic public and political popularity. The first period of substantial antitrust activity began 15 years after the passage of the Sherman Act, and lasted into the 1920s. The Great Depression saw antitrust at its lowest, followed by Thurman Arnold's aggressive tenure, but World War II was hardly a period of great antitrust enthusiasm. The 1950 Celler-Kefauver amendment to section 7 began the golden age of antitrust, a period that lasted until the middle 1970s. So far, …

Farewell To The Sea Of Doubt: Jettisoning The Constitutional Sherman Act, Thomas C. Arthur

Faculty Articles

This Article proceeds as follows. Part I examines the legislative history of the Sherman Act to discover the policy choices actually made by the 1890 Congress. Part II sketches the development, operation and social costs of the conventional "constitutional" approach which now dominates section 1 adjudication. This Part demonstrates how the Supreme Court's failure to establish a workable methodology for resolving hard cases in the first Sherman Act decisions enabled it later to create the myth that the 1890 Congress made no hard policy choices. It then shows that the lack of a recognized statutory standard inevitably leads to doctrinal …