Law Commons^™

A Preface To Neoclassical Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Most legal historians speak of the period following classical legal thought as “progressive legal thought.” That term creates an unwarranted bias in characterization, however, creating the impression that conservatives clung to an obsolete “classical” ideology, when in fact they were in many ways just as revisionist as the progressives legal thinkers whom they critiqued. The Progressives and New Deal thinkers whom we identify with progressive legal thought were nearly all neoclassical, or marginalist, in their economics, but it is hardly true that all marginalists were progressives. For example, the lawyers and policy makers in the corporate finance battles of the …

Business Interest Cases – October 2009 Term, Leon D. Lazer, Leon Friedman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Predation Analysis And The Ftc’S Case Against Intel, Daniel A. Crane

Law & Economics Working Papers

The Federal Trade Commission's pending antitrust case against Intel challenges a number of Intel's discounting and rebating practices. The Commission appears poised to apply a cost-price test to the challenged practices, but proposes to include "fixed sunk costs" in the appropriate measure of cost. This paper explains the importance of using cost-price screens to assess unilaterally imposed prices and analyzes the futility of including sunk costs in the relevant cost measure.

Accountable Care Organizations: A New New Thing With Some Old Problems, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

When pressed for evidence that the proposed health reform legislation will control costs, proponents invariably cite the numerous pilot programs and other innovations in Medicare payment policy contained in the bill. At first blush, the ACO model seems well designed to foster competition among providers. Not unlike health maintenance organizations and other integrated delivery forms, ACOs assume responsibility for coordinating care and thus have strong incentives to provide cost effective care and to do so in a manner that is transparent and hospitable to comparative shoppers. But at the same time, the path of ACO development could prove profoundly anti-competitive. …

Debunking The Purchaser Welfare Account Of Section 2 Of The Sherman Act: How Harvard Brought Us A Total Welfare Standard And Why We Should Keep It, Alan J. Meese

Faculty Publications

The last several years have seen a vigorous debate among antitrust scholars and practitionersa bout the appropriates tandardf or evaluating the conduct of monopolists under section 2 of the Sherman Act. While most of the debate over possible standards has focused on the empirical question of each standard's economic utility, this Article undertakes a somewhat different task: It examines the normative benchmark that courts have actually chosen when adjudicating section 2 cases. This Article explores three possible benchmarks-producer welfare, purchaser welfare, and total welfare-and concludes that courts have opted for a total welfare normative approach to section 2 since the …

Reflections On Section 5 Of The Ftc Act And The Ftc's Case Against Intel, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC’s”) unprecedented enforcement action against Intel raises profound issues concerning the scope of the FTC’s powers to give a construction to Section 5 of the FTC Act that goes beyond the substantive reach of the Sherman Act. While I have urged the FTC to assert such independence from the Sherman Act, this is the wrong case to make a break. Indeed, if anything, Intel poses a risk of seriously setting back the development of an independent Section 5 power by provoking a hostile appellate court to rebuke the FTC’s effort and cabin the FTC’s powers in …

National Security Review Of Foreign Mergers And Acquisitions Of Domestic Companies In China And The United States, Kenneth Y. Hui

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

China’s recently enacted Anti-Monopoly Law has received much academic attention. In particular, many articles and comments have been written about Article 31 of the Anti-Monopoly Law, a provision on national security review of foreign mergers and acquisitions of domestic companies. The provision has often been labelled as draconian and protectionist. This paper argues that Article 31 is not necessarily so. Article 31 is actually, to a large extent, in line with the national security provisions found in liberal economies. By taking a comparative approach, this paper will demonstrate the similarities between the national security laws in China and the United …

Mergers And Market Dominance, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Mergers involving dominant firms legitimately receive close scrutiny under the antitrust laws, even if they involve tiny firms. Further, they should be examined closely even in markets that generally exhibit low entry barriers. Many of the so-called "unilateral effects" cases in current merger law are in fact mergers that create dominant firms. The rhetoric of unilateral effects often serves to disguise this fact by presenting the situation as if it involves the ability of a small number of firms (typically two or three) in a much larger market to increase their price to unacceptable levels. In fact, if such a …

Competition Policy And Organizational Fragmentation In Health Care, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

A central challenge for all health care reform proposals currently being discussed is finding the means to effectively channel market forces given many deeply embedded features of our system and the peculiar economics of health care delivery and financing. This essay traces the path of competition law in health care and explains its chicken-and-egg relationship with provider organizational arrangements. It explores a central puzzle for future health care policy: why have market forces failed to counteract organizational fragmentation? Answering this question requires an understanding of why competition policy is inexorably linked to the organizational structures of health care providers and …

Competition Policy And Comparative Corporate Governance Of State-Owned Enterprises, D. Daniel Sokol

UF Law Faculty Publications

The legal origins literature overlooks a key area of corporate governance-the governance of state-owned enterprises ("SOEs"). There are key theoretical differences between SOEs and publicly-traded corporations. In comparing the differences of both internal and external controls of SOEs, none of the existing legal origins allow for effective corporate governance monitoring. Because of the difficulties of undertaking a cross-country quantitative review of the governance of SOEs, this Article examines, through a series of case studies, SOE governance issues among postal providers. The examination of postal firms supports the larger theoretical claim about the weaknesses of SOE governance across legal origins. In …

Do Reverse Payment Settlements Violate The Antitrust Laws, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

The term "reverse payment" has been used as shorthand to characterize a variety of diverse agreements between patent owners and alleged infringers that involve a transfer of consideration from the patent owner to the alleged infringer. Reverse payment settlements are particularly associated with drug patent challenges mounted by generic drug companies under the Hatch-Waxman Act. Many, including the Federal Trade Commission, would characterize these agreements as antitrust violations. However, courts have generally declined to find these agreements in violation of the antitrust laws based solely on the presence of a reverse payment.

This article begins in Section II with an …

Antitrust & Hospital Mergers: Does The Nonprofit Form Affect Competitive Substance?, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

Following a string of government losses in cases challenging hospital mergers in federal court, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice issued their report on competition in health care seeking to set the record straight on a number of issues that underlie the judiciary's resolution of these cases. One such issue is the import of nonprofit status for applying antitrust law. This essay describes antitrust's role in addressing the consolidation in the hospital sector and the subtle influence that the social function of the nonprofit hospital has had in merger litigation. Noting that the political and social context …

Who Determines The Optimal Trade-Off Between Quality And Price?, Barbara Ann White

All Faculty Scholarship

The question of the optimal trade-off between quality and price has become increasingly important as well as complex in recent times, as the advances of modern technology permit a far more refined range of choices. These subtleties among choices allow an individual, a group, or a society to titrate more precisely degrees of quality with almost any product or service, coupled, of course, with counterbalancing price consequences.

In 2002, as Program Chair of the Antitrust Section of the Association of American Law Schools, I organized a panel entitled “Guilds at the Millennium: Antitrust and the Professions” and served as one …

Mergers And Acquisitions In The European Community And The United States: A Movement Toward A Uniform Enforcement Body, David Snyder

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Strategic Alliances: Emerging Trends In Future Corporate Business, Naresh Menghraj Gehi

LLM Theses and Essays

A strategic alliance is an arrangement for economic collaboration between firms at the same level of distribution, involving an exchange of critical skills aimed at buffering the core business strategy, technology, or markets of the partners. Research indicates that the care and thought of the strategic alliance partners increases with the importance of the venture to the strategic objectives of the entity. This paper describes the importance of strategic alliances in today’s competitive world. It examines the benefits of entering into strategic alliances, the legal implications of strategic alliances, and various industries where strategic alliances are dominant. Finally, this paper …

Fringe Firms And Incentives To Innovate, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Corporate Law Through An Antitrust Lens, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Price Effects Of Horizontal Mergers, Alan A. Fisher Ph.D., Frederick I. Johnson Ph.D., Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

When should the government challenge a merger that might increase market power but also generate efficiency gains? The dominant belief has been that the government and courts should evaluate these mergers solely in terms of economic efficiency. Congress, however, wanted the courts to stop any merger significantly likely to raise prices. Substantially likely efficiency gains should therefore affect the legality of mergers to the extent that they are likely to prevent price increases. This standard is more strict than the economic efficiency criterion, because the latter would permit mergers substantially likely to lead to higher prices, if sufficient efficiency gains …

Cable Traffic And The First Amendment Must-Carry Under A Diversity Approach And Antitrust As Possible Alternative, Bruno Vandermeulen

LLM Theses and Essays

Recent technological progress in the field of telecommunications has greatly changed the competitive structure between broadcasters, cable operators, and telephone companies. The legal and economic environment for these media participants has shifted, and new problems have arisen. One major problem is the enhanced threat of concentration of media corporations, as corporate bigness becomes desirable and the number of diversified owners of media outlets continues to decrease. This paper analyzes broadcasting regulations and subsequent case law to show the concern by the legislature and regulatory agencies to preserve diversity in opinion and media-ownership through emphasis on “localism” and a “marketplace of …

Quality Of Care And Market Failure Defenses In Antitrust Health Care Litigation, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

This article considers quality-based justifications for antitrust challenges to collaboration among health care professionals. It first examines doctrinal developments resisting such justifications and, with a skeptical eye, analyzes attempts to interject quality of care and worthy motive defenses into antitrust appraisals of horizontal restraints of trade. Next the article assesses the economic basis and the risks and benefits of a market failure defense that would allow some quality-enhancing restraints of trade to escape antitrust challenge. Its principle recommendation is that courts recognize a narrow, market failure defense subject to several limiting principles to cabin its reach. The article concludes by …

Intracorporate Plurality In Criminal Conspiracy Law, Sarah N. Welling

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The concept of conspiracy currently plays a significant role in three areas of substantive law: antitrust, civil rights, and criminal law. Although the role of conspiracy in these substantive areas of law differs in many ways, all three require that the conspiracy consist of a plurality of actors. Determining what constitutes a plurality of actors when all the alleged conspirators are agents of a single corporation poses a continuing problem.

This problem raises two distinct questions. The first is whether, when one agent acts alone within the scope of corporate business, the agent and the corporation constitute a plurality. The …

Limiting Conglomerate Mergers: The Need For Legislation, Joseph F. Brodley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Potential Competition Mergers: A Structural Synthesis, Joseph F. Brodley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Standard Oil Decision: The Rule Of Reason, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

After twenty-one years the Sherman Anti Trust Act has been applied to the typical combination restraining interstate commerce, which that act was designed to prevent.