Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Broadening Consumer Law: Competition, Protection, And Distribution, Rory Van Loo

Notre Dame Law Review

Policymakers and scholars have in distributional conversations traditionally ignored consumer laws, defined as the set of consumer protection, antitrust, and entry-barrier laws that govern consumer transactions. Consumer law is overlooked partly because tax law is cast as the most efficient way to redistribute. Another obstacle is that consumer law research speaks to microeconomic and siloed contexts—deceptive fees by Wells Fargo or a proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Even removing millions of dollars of deceptive credit card fees across the nation seems trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent decades. …

Whatever Did Happen To The Antitrust Movement?, Herbert Hovenkamp

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article begins with a historical question about whatever happened to the antitrust movement. The short answer is that antitrust grew up. It ceased to be the stuff of political banners and loose rhetoric and turned into a serious discipline, applying defensible legal and empirical techniques to problems within its range of competence.

The way to repair deficiencies in antitrust law today is not to resort to an undisciplined set of goals that provide no guidance and could do serious harm to the economy. Rather, it is to make ongoing adjustments in our technical rules of antitrust enforcement which reflect …