Law Commons^™

Brandeisian Banking, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

Banking law shapes the structure of the banking system, which in turn shapes the structure of the economy. One of the most significant ways that banking law in the United States traditionally sought to promote Brandeisian values of stability and decentralization was through a combination of carrots and sticks that enabled small banks across the country to thrive. To see this requires a richer understanding of Brandeis as someone who valued not just atomistic competition but also small business and broad flourishing. It also requires a deeper understanding of the ways different parts of banking law worked together during the …

Antitrust And Sustainability: A Landscape Analysis, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment, Sabin Center For Climate Change Law

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment

Competition policy and antitrust law are experiencing a global renaissance. New market realities such as digital market gatekeepers, the financialization of firms, highly concentrated markets, a rising labor movement, industrial policy, and trade wars, among others, are radically reshaping how this policy area is understood and applied.

Sustainability concerns have also been a driving force for reconstituting antitrust to meet twenty-first century challenges. It is now widely accepted that competition policy – both its aims and its enforcement – has wider societal impacts beyond competition, including effects on democracy, economic inequality, growth and innovation, racial and gender imbalances, privacy, geopolitical …

Antitrust Rulemaking: The Ftc’S Delegation Deficit, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) recent assertion of authority to engage in legislative rulemaking in antitrust matters can be addressed in terms of three frameworks: the major questions doctrine, the Chevron doctrine, and as a matter of ordinary statutory interpretation. The article argues that as a matter of ordinary statutory interpretation the FTC has no such authority. This can be seen by considering the structure and history of the Act and is confirmed by the 1975 Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act. Given that the result follows from ordinary statutory interpretation, it is unnecessary for courts to consider the other two …

The Gravity Of Legal Diffusion, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton, Katerina Linos

Faculty Scholarship

A persistent empirical finding is that bilateral trade between two countries is proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We hypothesize that a similar pattern is likely to hold for the diffusion of laws. We specifically argue that countries’ propensity to update their laws to converge with the leading regulator in a given policy area is likely to be proportional to the size of their economies and inversely proportional to their geographic distance. We then empirically test this theory in the area of antitrust and assess countries’ convergence to the world’s leading antitrust …

Accounting For The Employee-Employer Relationship In Antitrust Analysis, Justin Mccrary, Bryan Ricchetti

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have seen increased regulatory scrutiny of and private litigant claims regarding potential monopsony power in labor markets. In this paper, we discuss a defining feature of that analysis — a feature that differentiates it from antitrust analysis of product-market restraints. That feature is the employee-employer relationship. Employer-employee relationships, and investments that workers and firms make in such relationships, are central to analysis of antitrust issues in labor markets.

Q&A With Lina Khan, Chair Of The U.S. Federal Trade Commission And Mark Glick, Professor Of Economics At The University Of Utah, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

Let me tell you a little about Lina. Lina attended Yale Law school and while a third-year law student she wrote her famous and influential article Amazon’s Anti-Trust Paradox. Then, after graduating from law school, she worked as the legal director at the Open Markets Institute and during that period she continued to write a large number of influential antitrust papers. She then joined the faculty of my alma mater, Columbia Law School. In 2019, she was appointed as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Subcomittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law and, in 2021, President Biden appointed her …

Section 5 In Action: Reinvigorating The Ftc Act And The Rule Of Law, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 didn’t just create a new agency. It created new law for that agency to enforce. The heart of that law is Section 5, which provides that ‘unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce’ are ‘hereby declared unlawful’. In passing this law, Congress also tasked the FTC with identifying the range of methods of competition that qualify as unfair, since lawmakers recognized they could not specify them all prospectively.

This is a straightforward reading of the statute, and yet it is somewhat controversial. There is a school of thought that considers Section 5’s …

Comments To The Draft Working Group Iii Workplan, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment, International Institute For Environment And Development, International Institute For Sustainable Development

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is currently working on how to reform international investment treaties, focusing in particular on those treaties’ provisions enabling investors to sue governments in international arbitration. As an observer organization in this process, CCSI has emphasized that in the context of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform, it is important to first consider what it is that investment treaties aim to achieve, and only then to consider what form(s) of dispute settlement will best advance those objectives. This means not only looking at reform of the existing ISDS mechanism, but also alternatives to …

Do Legal Origins Predict Legal Substance?, Anu Bradford, Yun-Chien Chang, Adam S. Chilton, Nuno Garoupa

Faculty Scholarship

There is a large body of research in economics and law suggesting that the legal origin of a country – that is, whether its legal regime is based on English common law or French, German, or Nordic civil law – profoundly impacts a range of outcomes. However, the exact relationship between legal origin and legal substance has been disputed in the literature and not fully explored with nuanced legal coding. We revisit this debate while leveraging novel cross-country data sets that provide detailed coding of two areas of laws: property and antitrust. We find that having shared legal origins strongly …

Regulating Antitrust Through Trade Agreements, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton

Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust law is one of the most commonly deployed instruments of economic regulation around the world. To date, over 130 countries have adopted a domestic antitrust law. These countries comprise developed and developing nations alike, and combined produce over 95 percent of the world’s GDP. Most of the countries that have adopted an antitrust law have done so since 1990. This period of significant proliferation of antitrust laws also coincides with a notable expansion of international trade agreements, including the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the negotiation of numerous bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. These …

Plurilateral Cooperation As An Alternative To Trade Agreements: Innovating One Domain At A Time, Bernard M. Hoekman, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

At the end of 2017 different groups of WTO members decided to launch talks on four subjects, setting aside the WTO consensus working practice. This paper argues that these ‘joint statement initiatives’ (JSIs) should seek to establish open plurilateral agreements (OPAs) even in instances where the outcome can be incorporated into existing schedules of commitments of participating WTO members. Designing agreements as OPAs provides an institutional framework for collaboration among the responsible national authorities, transparency, mutual review and learning, as well as alternatives to default WTO dispute settlement procedures which may not be appropriate for supporting cooperation on the matters …

Investment Promotion And Facilitation For Sustainable Development, Brooke Guven

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Investment is a critical component of sustainable development. In particular, under the right conditions, foreign direct investment (FDI) can improve economic growth and living standards, create jobs, transfer technology and know-how and result in supply chain upgrading. However, its benefits are not automatic, and, if not carefully governed, investment can result in harm to the environment, labour standards and lead to tax evasion or other undesirable outcomes. Investment promotion and investment facilitation, in turn, can help states attract, expand and retain FDI.

Comment On Us Trade And Investment Agreements Submitted To Ustr, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Comments to USTR Re: U.S.-Kenya Trade Agreement (April 28, 2020): CCSI, in response to the United States Trade Representative’s request for public comment to inform its approach to a U.S.-Kenya Trade Agreement, submitted Comments elaborating on our main points that (1) investor-state dispute settlement should not be included in any U.S.-Kenya agreement and (2) principles that should guide an investment chapter or investment provisions in any such agreement should (a) strategically support cross-border investment that produces positive development outcomes for the U.S. and Kenya, (b) facilitate and support good governance of investment projects, and (c) enhance cooperation to solve challenges …

Tech Dominance And The Policeman At The Elbow, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

One school of thought takes much of law and the legal system as essentially irrelevant to the process of technological evolution. This view takes as axiomatic that the rate technological change is always accelerating, that any firm or institution dependent on a given technology is therefore doomed to a rapid obsolescence. Law, at best, risks interfering with a natural progression toward a better technological future, hindering “the march of civilization.”

This paper discusses the historical role of antitrust investigation in changing the course of technological development by focusing on the example of the IBM litigation (1969 - 1984). While widely …

Nascent Competitors, C. Scott Hemphill, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

A nascent competitor is a firm whose prospective innovation represents a serious threat to an incumbent. Protecting such competition is a critical mission for antitrust law, given the outsized role of unproven outsiders as innovators and the uniquely potent threat they often pose to powerful entrenched firms. In this Article, we identify nascent competition as a distinct analytical category and outline a program of antitrust enforcement to protect it. We make the case for enforcement even where the ultimate competitive significance of the target is uncertain, and explain why a contrary view is mistaken as a matter of policy and …

The End Of Antitrust History Revisited, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

This Review engages Tim Wu’s book, The Curse of Bigness, to explain the significance of the current rupture in antitrust and to situate it within a broader intellectual trajectory. Debates over the foundational purpose of antitrust are not new, and examining how this latest clash fits alongside previous contestations is essential for understanding what has yielded the current contestability and assessing the competing visions.

Part I of this Review summarizes Wu’s chief contributions in his recent work, focusing on three tenets that form the basis of the book. Part II offers an analytic breakdown of the overhaul in antitrust …

The Case For "Unfair Methods Of Competition" Rulemaking, Rohit Chopra, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

A key feature of antitrust today is that the law is developed entirely through adjudication. Evidence suggests that this exclusive reliance on adjudication has failed to deliver a predictable, efficient, or participatory antitrust regime. Antitrust litigation and enforcement are protracted and expensive, requiring extensive discovery and costly expert analysis. In theory, this approach facilitates nuanced and fact-specific analysis of liability and well-tailored remedies. But in practice, the exclusive reliance on case-by-case adjudication has yielded a system of enforcement that generates ambiguity, drains resources, privileges incumbents, and deprives individuals and firms of any real opportunity to participate in the process of …

Antitrust & Corruption: Overruling Noerr, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a time when concerns about influence over the American political process by powerful private interests have reached an apogee, both on the left and the right. Among the laws originally intended to fight excessive private influence over republican institutions were the antitrust laws, whose sponsors were concerned not just with monopoly, but also its influence over legislatures and politicians. While no one would claim that the antitrust laws were meant to be comprehensive anti-corruption laws, there can be little question that they were passed with concerns about the political influence of powerful firms and industry cartels.

Since …

The Curse Of Bigness: New Deal Supplement, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

This is a supplement to the book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. It covers the years between 1920 - 1945, with a focus on the New Deal, and represents material left out of the original book.

It is meant to be read together with the larger volume, but can also be read separately.

The Chicago School’S Limited Influence On International Antitrust, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton, Filippo Maria Lancieri

Faculty Scholarship

Beginning in the 1950s, a group of scholars primarily associated with the University of Chicago began to challenge many of the fundamental tenants of antitrust law. This movement, which became known as the Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis, profoundly altered the course of American antitrust scholarship, regulation, and enforcement. What is not known, however, is the degree to which Chicago School ideas influenced the antitrust regimes of other countries. By leveraging new datasets on antitrust laws and enforcement around the world, we empirically explore whether ideas embraced by the Chicago School diffused internationally. Our analysis illustrates that many ideas explicitly …

Preventing The Bad From Getting Worse: The End Of The World (Trade Organization) As We Know It?, Bernard Hoekman, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Recent survey evidence and proposals made in long-running negotiations to improve WTO dispute settlement procedures illustrate that many stakeholders believe the system needs improvement. The Appellate Body crisis could have been avoided but for the use of consensus as WTO working practice. Resolving the crisis should prove possible because the matter mostly concerns a small number of more powerful WTO members. We make several proposals to revitalize the WTO appellate function but argue that unless the WTO becomes a locus for new rulemaking, re-establishing the appellate function will not prevent a steady decline in the salience of the organization. A …

Inconsistency's Many Forms In Investor-State Dispute Settlement And Implications For Reform, Lise Johnson, Lisa E. Sachs

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Attracting investment in agriculture has been a key policy goal of governments in the global south. Development partners have supported these policies. But what do governments hope to achieve by attracting investment in the agricultural sector? Why are companies interested in investing? What is in it for local communities? And what is the role of lawyers? This primer provides an introduction to some of the key issues that arise in the negotiation of contracts linked to investments in agriculture, and practical guidance for how to approach common issues. Section 1 of this primer outlines the typical goals of three important …

Uncitral Working Group Iii On Isds Reform: How Cross-Cutting Issues Reshape Reform Options, Lorenzo Cotula, Thierry Berger, Lise Johnson, Brooke Güven, Jesse Coleman

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is currently working on how to reform international investment treaties, focusing in particular on those treaties’ provisions enabling investors to sue governments in international arbitration. As an observer organization in this process, CCSI has emphasized that in the context of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform, it is important to first consider what it is that investment treaties aim to achieve, and only then to consider what form(s) of dispute settlement will best advance those objectives. This means not only looking at reform of the existing ISDS mechanism, but also alternatives to …

Draft Text Providing For Transparency And Prohibiting Certain Forms Of Third-Party Funding In Investor–State Dispute Settlement, Brooke Güven, Lise Johnson, Nathalie Bernasconi-Osterwalder, Lorenzo Cotula, Jane Kelsey

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is currently working on how to reform international investment treaties, focusing in particular on those treaties’ provisions enabling investors to sue governments in international arbitration. As an observer organization in this process, CCSI has emphasized that in the context of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform, it is important to first consider what it is that investment treaties aim to achieve, and only then to consider what form(s) of dispute settlement will best advance those objectives. This means not only looking at reform of the existing ISDS mechanism, but also alternatives to …

Third-Party Rights In Investor-State Dispute Settlement: Options For Reform, Jesse Coleman, Lise Johnson, Brooke Güven, Lorenzo Cotula, Thierry Berger

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is currently working on how to reform international investment treaties, focusing in particular on those treaties’ provisions enabling investors to sue governments in international arbitration. As an observer organization in this process, CCSI has emphasized that in the context of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform, it is important to first consider what it is that investment treaties aim to achieve, and only then to consider what form(s) of dispute settlement will best advance those objectives. This means not only looking at reform of the existing ISDS mechanism, but also alternatives to …

Draft Treaty Language: Withdrawal Of Consent To Arbitrate And Termination Of International Investment Agreements, Brooke Güven, Lise Johnson

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is currently working on how to reform international investment treaties, focusing in particular on those treaties’ provisions enabling investors to sue governments in international arbitration. As an observer organization in this process, CCSI has emphasized that in the context of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform, it is important to first consider what it is that investment treaties aim to achieve, and only then to consider what form(s) of dispute settlement will best advance those objectives. This means not only looking at reform of the existing ISDS mechanism, but also alternatives to …

Ccsi Submits Written Views To Us Department Of State Regarding Uncitral’S Working Group Iii, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In connection with the US Department of State’s Annual Advisory Committee on Private International law meeting in May 2019, CCSI submitted written views regarding UNCITRAL’s Working Group III on ISDS reform. CCSI’s comments highlighted specific areas of CCSI’s research as it relates to the US Government and its work within the Working Group. Specifically, US investment treaty negotiating objectives specify that covered foreign investors in the United States should not be accorded greater substantive rights than domestic investors. CCSI highlights the ways in which greater procedural rights afforded under investment treaties to foreign investors in practice result in greater substantive …

Blind Spot: The Attention Economy And The Law, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Human attention, valuable and limited in supply, is a resource. It has become commonplace, especially in the media and technology industries, to speak of an "attention economy" and of competition in "attention markets.” There is even an attentional currency, the "basic attention token," which purports to serve as a medium of exchange for user attention. Firms like Facebook and Google, which have emerged as two of the most important firms in the global economy, depend nearly exclusively on attention markets as a business model.

Yet despite the well-recognized commercial importance of attention markets, antitrust and consumer protection authorities have struggled …

Competition Enforcement, Trade And Global Governance: A Few Comments, Petros C. Mavroidis, Damien J. Neven

Faculty Scholarship

The debate on international antitrust has come from two perspectives. On the one hand, the trade community has emphasised the interface between trade policy and competition (policy and) enforcement. This interface, which was recognised from the outset of multilateral efforts to liberalise trade in what would become the GATT and eventually the WTO, focuses on the prospect that trade liberalisation through border instruments should not be undone by restrictive business practices (RBPs), placing a particular responsibility in this respect on competition enforcement. On the other hand, the antitrust community has emphasised the risk of inefficient enforcement when several jurisdictions can …

Trade Openness And Antitrust Law, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton

Faculty Scholarship

Openness to international trade and adoption of antitrust laws can both curb anti-competitive behavior. But scholars have long debated the relationship between the two. Some argue that greater trade openness makes antitrust unnecessary, while others contend that antitrust laws are still needed to realize the benefits of trade liberalization. Data limitations have made this debate largely theoretical to date. We study the relationship between trade and antitrust empirically using new data on antitrust laws and enforcement activities. We find that trade openness and stringency of antitrust laws are positively correlated from 1950 to 2010 overall, but the positive correlation disappears …