Law Commons^™

Antitrust’S State Action Doctrine And The Ordinary Powers Of Corporations, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The Supreme Court has now agreed to review the Eleventh Circuit's decision in Phoebe-Putney, which held that a state statute permitting a hospital authority to acquire hospitals implicitly authorized such acquisitions when they were anticompetitive – in this particular case very likely facilitating a merger to monopoly. Under antitrust law’s “state action” doctrine a state may in fact authorize such an acquisition, provided that it “clearly articulates” its desire to approve an action that would otherwise constitute an antitrust violation and also “actively supervises” any private conduct that might fall under the state’s regulatory scheme.

“Authorization” in the context of …

Expanding Stare Decisis: The Role Of Precedent In The Unfolding Dialectic Of Brady V. Maryland, Colin Starger

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Does stare decisis constrain the expansion of constitutional doctrine? Does existing precedent preclude the Supreme Court from expanding a criminal defendant’s right to exculpatory evidence? While commentators frequently clash on when stare decisis should prevent the Court from overruling its own precedents, the question of when fidelity to precedent should inhibit doctrinal expansion is surprisingly under-theorized. This Article begins to fill this gap through an in-depth case study of stare decisis and the expansion of criminal due process doctrine.

This Article analyzes the longstanding constitutional dialectic between procedural and substantive schools of criminal due process. Focus is on Brady v. …

A Visual Guide To Nfib V. Sebelius, Colin Starger

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Though Chief Justice Roberts ultimately provided the fifth vote upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) under the Tax Power, his was also one of five votes finding the ACA exceeded Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause.

The doctrinal basis for Roberts’ Commerce Clause analysis was hotly contested. While Roberts argued that the ACA’s purported exercise of Commerce power “finds no support in our precedent,” Justice Ginsburg accused the Chief Justice of failing to “evaluat[e] the constitutionality of the minimum coverage provision in the manner established by our precedents.”

These diametrically opposed perspectives on “precedent” might prompt observers to ask whether …

The Short-Sighted Attack On Patent Eligibility Of Healthcare Related Patents, Gregory Dolin

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On March 20, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously decided the case of Mayo Collaborative Svc. v. Prometheus Labs. At issue was a patent, held by Prometheus that taught doctors how to adjust the amount of thiopurine (a drug used for treatment of a variety of autoimmune diseases) administered to a patient. In an opinion by Justice Breyer, the Court held Prometheus’s invention to not be patent eligible and invalidated the patent. Though I believe that the reasoning the Court employed was erroneous and highly problematic (of which more later), the decision could have been viewed as …

Markets In Merger Analysis, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Antitrust merger policy suffers from a disconnect between its articulated concerns and the methodologies it employs. The Supreme Court has largely abandoned the field of horizontal merger analysis, leaving us with ancient decisions that have never been overruled but whose fundamental approach has been ignored or discredited. As a result the case law reflects the structuralism of a bygone era, focusing on industrial concentration and market shares, largely to the exclusion of other measures of competitive harm, including price increases. Only within the last generation has econometrics developed useful techniques for estimating the price impact of specific mergers in differentiated …

Iqbal And Interpretation, Karen Petroski

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Assessing a year’s worth of debate over the 2009 Supreme Court decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, this Article provides a novel explanation for the decision and presents it as radical indeed, but in a way previously unremarked by commentators. The sharp divisions in the responses to Iqbal have masked a deeper consensus and have blocked wide awareness of the decision’s constructive potential for diverse interest groups. This consensus is based on a simplified account of the ideal function of pleading in our system of civil litigation, one that first took hold in the early twentieth century. What unsettles many observers …

Antitrust And The Movement Of Technology, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Patents create strong incentives for collaborative development. For many technologies fixed costs are extremely high in relation to variable costs. A second feature of technology that encourages collaborative development is the need for interoperability or common standards. Third, in contrast to traditional commons, intellectual property commons are almost always nonrivalrous on the supply side. If ten producers all own the rights to make a product covered by a patent, each one can make as many units as it pleases without limiting the number that others can make. That might seem to be a good thing, but considered ex ante it …

Reverse Abstention, Samuel P. Jordan

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State courts decide claims based on federal or sister-state law every day. Although the applicable constitutional provisions are different, there are significant similarities in the way the Supreme Court conceptualizes the constraints on how those claims must be treated. One project of this Article is to chart those similarities, providing a unified account of the Court’s approach to judicial federalism. The larger project, however, is not to describe the Court’s approach, but to replace it. The current emphasis on discrimination and interference imposes burdensome and unwarranted obligations on state courts. A more flexible approach to judicial federalism is needed, and …