Law Commons^™

Defying Conventional Wisdom: The Case For Private Antitrust Enforcement, Joshua P. Davis, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

The conventional wisdom is that private antitrust enforcement lacks any value. Indeed, skepticism of private enforcement has been so great that its critics make contradictory claims. The first major line of criticism is that private enforcement achieves too little — it does not even minimally compensate the actual victims of antitrust violations and does not significantly deter those violations. A second line of criticism contends that private enforcement achieves too much — providing excessive compensation, often to the wrong parties, and producing overdeterrence. This article undertakes the first ever systematic evaluation of these claims. Building upon original empirical work and …

The Extraordinary Deterrence Of Private Antitrust Enforcement: A Reply To Werden, Robert H. Lande, Joshua P. Davis

All Faculty Scholarship

Our article, "Comparative Deterrence from Private Enforcement and Criminal Enforcement of the U.S. Antitrust Laws," 2011 B.Y.U. L. Rev. 315, documented an extraordinary but usually overlooked fact: private antitrust enforcement deters a significant amount of anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, the article showed that private enforcement "probably" deters even more anticompetitive conduct than the almost universally admired anti-cartel enforcement program of the United States Department of Justice.

In a recent issue of Antitrust Bulletin, Gregory J. Werden, Scott D. Hammond, and Belinda A. Barnett challenged our analysis. They asserted that our comparison “is more misleading than informative.” It is unsurprising that they …