Law Commons^™

Making Rules Vs Ruling, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Popular Media

In an effort to fight inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee raised interest rates to 20% over the course of 1980 and 1981, triggering a recession that threw more than 4 million Americans, many in well-paying manufacturing jobs, out of work.

As it continues to do today, the committee met in secret and explained its rate decisions in a handful of paragraphs.

None of the millions of Americans thrown out of work—or the many businesses driven to bankruptcy—sued the FOMC. No one argued that the FOMC’s power to disrupt the American economy was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority. No …

Antitrust Can't Tame Inequality, Let Alone Inflation, Ramsi Woodcock

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The Biden administration’s plans to take antitrust action to head off inflation are splitting progressives, with some openly rejecting the notion that monopolies are to blame for surging prices and others arguing that even if the initiative fails to tame inflation, more antitrust enforcement can only be a good thing.

What both sides should be questioning is not whether applying antitrust to inflation is too much of a good thing, but whether antitrust is good for progressives at all. Because, as I explain in a recent paper, an inconvenient truth about competition is that it breeds inequality — something economists …

The Real Monopoly Is In The Boardroom, Ramsi Woodcock

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We have always thought of the problem of monopoly as a problem of size or of markets. We say that Facebook is a monopoly because it is too big, or because it is in the nature of networked markets to reward scale.

But what if the problem of monopoly were really a problem of firm governance?

We don’t hate monopolies in themselves; we hate them for what they do. They charge us higher prices or deliver us lower-quality products. They pay us less or make our jobs harder.

But what a monopolist does is determined not by its size …

What Those Shocking Texas Power Bills Have In Common With Uber Surges, Broadway Tickets, And Airfare, Ramsi Woodcock

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You might think that the $17,000 bills that Texas electricity providers are sending to customers who kept their lights on during last week’s historic storm reflect red state libertarian ideology run amuck. But you would be wrong.

They are actually the product of the exact same approach to markets reflected in the congestion-pricing plan for midtown Manhattan adopted by the New York State legislature in 2019, in the way Broadway priced tickets for shows like The Lion King and Wicked before the pandemic, and the way airlines have been pricing seats for years.

The problem is not ideological but intellectual, …

Google And Shifting Conceptions Of What It Means To Improve A Product, Ramsi Woodcock

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Judges sometimes claim that they do not pick winners when they decide antitrust cases. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Competitive conduct by its nature harms competitors, and so if antitrust were merely to prohibit harm to competitors, antitrust would then destroy what it is meant to promote.

What antitrust prohibits, therefore, is not harm to competitors but rather harm to competitors that fails to improve products. Only in this way is antitrust able to distinguish between the good firm that harms competitors by making superior products that consumers love and that competitors cannot match and the bad firm …

The Hidden Shortages Of The Market Economy, Ramsi Woodcock

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If you think shortages—in goods like toilet paper, meat, and masks—came in with the pandemic, think again.

Shortages are periods during which demand exceeds supply, and they’re an inescapable feature of all markets, all the time.

When an investor bids up the price of Apple stock because none is available at current prices, that’s a shortage. When a homeowner receives multiple bids for her home, that’s a shortage. When there are “only three left in stock” on Amazon and four users click “buy,” that, too, is a shortage.

We don’t notice these quotidian shortages because sellers usually respond to them …

The Economics Of Shortages, Ramsi Woodcock

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The price of food increased 2.6% in April, the largest single-month increase since 1974, but food industry executives are insisting that the country has enough food. So why are prices going up?

The explanation provided by the industry is that consumers are buying more than they need, creating shortages.

But a shortage is not a good excuse for increasing prices. Contrary to what you might have learned in Econ 101, there’s only one reason for which a shortage should give rise to higher prices: profiteering, as I explain in a forthcoming law review article.

If shortage were the only explanation …

The Virulence Of Free Trade, Ramsi Woodcock

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Specialists know that the antitrust courses taught in law schools and economics departments have an alter ego in business curricula: the course on business strategy. The two courses cover the same material, but from opposite perspectives. Antitrust courses teach how to end monopolies; strategy courses teach how to construct and maintain them.

Strategy students go off and run businesses, and antitrust students go off and make government policy. That is probably the proper arrangement if the policy the antimonopolists make is domestic. We want the domestic economy to run efficiently, and so we want domestic policymakers to think about monopoly—and …

Big Ink V. Bigger Tech, Ramsi Woodcock

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When in 2011 Paul Krugman attacked the press for bending over backwards to give equal billing to conservative experts on social security, even though the conservatives were plainly wrong, I celebrated. Social security isn’t the biggest part of the government’s budget, and calls to privatize it in order to save the country from bankruptcy were blatant fear mongering. Why should the press report those calls with a neutrality that could mislead readers into thinking the position reasonable?

Journalists’ ethic of balanced reporting looked, at the time, like gross negligence at best, and deceit at worst. But lost in the pathos …

Explain It To Me: Tips For Effective Rule Explanation In Legal Analysis, Melissa N. Henke

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The process of rule explanation is an important part of legal analysis, because it informs the legal reader, be it another attorney or a judge, how the legal rule has been applied in past cases. In other words, the rule explanation is where we use case law “to define, explain, and exemplify” the legal rule that determines the outcomes of the client’s problem or dispute. Legal writing texts refer to this discussion of past cases as case illustrations, case descriptions, or case examples, and they often devote substantial space to the topic. This column highlights four tips for improving the …

Congestion Pricing Is Class Warfare. Here's A Better Idea., Ramsi Woodcock

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Plans are afoot to charge drivers to enter Manhattan. But we need a fairer way to reduce traffic.

The Elephant In The Market Power Debate, Ramsi Woodcock

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Profits are the ultimate sign of market power. But for the past 40 years, economists and antitrust practitioners have disparaged the measurement of profit margins as unreliable. That needs to change, and new scholarship showing rising margins across the economy is leading the way.

Getting Visual, Michael D. Murray

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No abstract provided.

Advertising Is Obsolete -- Here's Why It's Time To End It, Ramsi Woodcock

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Since it first became clear that Russian agents spent thousands of dollars a month on political advertising on social media in the runup to the 2016 presidential election, Americans have been asking how the powerful advertising infrastructure run by Google and Facebook could have been thrown open to foreign agents.

But fewer have stopped to ask whether there is a good reason for this infrastructure to exist at all. Why, exactly, is it a good thing for Facebook and Google to be selling advertising to anyone, let alone Russian agents?

The obvious answer seems to be so that legitimate advertisers, …

Ohio V. Amex, Supply Chain Fairness, And The Inadequacy Of Antitrust's Consumer Welfare Standard, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Popular Media

he Supreme Court’s decision in Ohio v. American Express last week demonstrates the inadequacy of antitrust’s consumer welfare standard, which limits enforcers to challenging only anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers. Under that standard, the Court could not condemn Amex’s blatantly anticompetitive limits on the ability of merchants to encourage consumers to use less expensive credit cards because the limits sapped the bargaining power of one level of the supply chain (merchants) in their negotiations with another (a credit card company), but did not obviously harm consumers. What antitrust needs is a standard that protects the bargaining power of Americans from …

Good Critical Reading Strategies Can Improve Legal Writing, Jane Bloom Grisé

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No abstract provided.

Art In The Shadow Of The Law, Brian L. Frye

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While precious little law is specific to art, a rich and complex body of social norms and customs effectively governs artworld transactions and informs the resolution of artworld disputes. In any case, a smattering of scholars study art law and a similar number of lawyers practice it. In this essay, I will provide a brief overview of art law from three different perspectives: the artist, the art market, and the art museum.

Antitrust As Corporate Governance: Why A Firm's Mission Is To Earn No Profit, Ramsi Woodcock

Law Faculty Popular Media

The consumer welfare standard in antitrust law requires that firms maximize the margin between price and product quality, a quantity called consumer welfare by economists. This standard, adopted in the 1970s, resolves the long-running debate about which corporate constituency has a right to the profits of the firm, because profits and consumer welfare are a zero-sum game: Profits can be generated only by reducing the margin between price and quality, in effect redistributing wealth from consumers to firms. The rule that consumer welfare must be maximized therefore means that profits must be minimized. The consumer welfare standard requires that firms …

Book Review | Who Killed Betty Gail Brown? Murder, Mistrial, And Mystery, William H. Fortune

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No abstract provided.

Language Changes, But Should Legal Writing Change With It?, Diane B. Kraft

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No abstract provided.

Regulating Nonmarriage, Albertina Antognini

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In the Closing Thoughts column of UK Law Notes, Prof. Albertina Antognini discusses her research on the regulation of nonmarriage. Two years have elapsed since the Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right to marry in the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges. Much ink has been spilled in the opinion’s aftermath by scholars who have in turn lauded it for its promotion of dignity and equality, criticized it for having a conservative vision of what marriage entails, or pored over its reasoning to better understand the future it has ushered in. Underlying the opinion, and the recent scholarly …

Irma Price Gouging Highlights Sad Truth: Consumer Fleecing Is The New Normal, Ramsi Woodcock

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By bringing desperation to so many, Hurricane Irma is revealing a sad fact about many American companies, and not just airlines: that they have come in recent years to embrace taking advantage of desperate consumers as a central part of their business models.

The practice, called dynamic pricing, is intended to ration scarce goods and services, yet, as I show in a recent paper, it primarily harms consumers by making it easier for companies to fleece them.

Amazon's Whole Foods Deal Could Still Be Reversed Thanks To Forgotten Antitrust Case, Ramsi Woodcock

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Amazon formally took ownership of Whole Foods this week after the Federal Trade Commission signaled on August 23 that it wouldn’t stop the deal.

The online retailer isn’t wasting any time remaking the high-end grocery chain in its low-price image. Its first act involved cutting prices on dozens of items, from avocados to tilapia. But that is not what is sending shivers down the aisles of rival food retailers like Walmart, which now controls 20 percent of the grocery market by pursuing just such a low-price strategy.

The reason, which the FTC ignored in providing its imprimatur, is that Amazon …

Eu's Antitrust 'War' On Google And Facebook Uses Abandoned American Playbook, Ramsi Woodcock

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On June 27, the European Union imposed a €2.4 billion (US$2.75 billion) fine on Google for giving favorable treatment in its search engine results to its own comparison shopping service. And Germany’s antitrust enforcer is investigating Facebook for asking users to sign away control over personal information.

In contrast, American antitrust enforcers have shown little interest in these companies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did open an investigation into whether Google has a search bias, but closed it in 2013, despite recognizing that it “may have had the effect of harming individual competitors.”

Anti-Americanism, however, does not explain these starkly …

Non-Charitable Purpose Trusts: Past, Present, And Future, Richard C. Ausness

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This Article focuses on non-charitable purpose trusts and how they enable estate planners to better carry out their clients’ objectives.

The Case For Federal Preemption Of State Blue Sky Laws, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.

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In our market economy, imposing rules on capital formation makes economic sense. Well-constructed rules regarding capital formation can promote the efficient flow of capital to its highest and best use and prevent or ameliorate fraud or unfairness to investors. These rules, however, generate additional offering costs that may retard or in some cases completely choke off the flow of capital from investors to businesses. The problem with state blue sky laws is their registration requirements, which significantly impede efficient capital formation and provide no material economic or societal benefits, such as protection of investors from fraud.

Tips For Writing Concisely, Kristin J. Hazelwood

Law Faculty Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Book Review | Crimesong, Robert G. Lawson

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No abstract provided.

Polishing Makes Perfect . . . Or Maybe Not, Melissa N. Henke

Law Faculty Popular Media

This column offers some tips and strategies that can improve the proofreading process you use. To be clear, I use the term proofreading to refer to the final stage of editing. Of course proofreading can never take the place of earlier stages of rewriting or revising for organization, content, clarity, or conciseness. But this final stage of editing is crucial, because it is where you identify and fix any problems with spelling, grammar, and punctuation that leave your document looking less than polished.

The Future Of Law Libraries, Tina M. Brooks, Franklin L. Runge, Beau Steenken

Law Faculty Popular Media

Law libraries are filed with the rules that govern our society, thoughtful scholars, conscientious lawyers, some hard working students, and some procrastinating students. In the past, this required libraries to collect hardbound volumes and loose leafs. Today, the collection is beginning to give way to research platforms filed with those same, or similar, materials and then some; much of the primary legal documentation is even freely available on the web.

While the physical footprint of the library may be smaller as a result of this transition, the amount of legal information that researchers have access to has grown exponentially. We …