Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

A New Prescription To Balance Secrecy And Disclosure In Drug-Approval Processes, Gerrit M. Beckhaus

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

To obtain approval to market a drug, a manufacturer must disclose significant amounts of research data to the government agency that oversees the approval process. The data often include information that could help advance scientific progress, and are therefore of great value. But current laws in both the United States and Europe give secrecy great weight. This Article proposes an obligatory sealed-bid auction of the sensitive information based on the experience with similar auctions in mergers and acquisitions, to balance manufacturers' interest in secrecy and the public interest in disclosure.

Pharmaceutical Patent Litigation Settlements: Balancing Patent & Antitrust Policy Through Institutional Choice, Timothy A. Cook

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

Should a branded pharmaceutical company be allowed to pay a generic competitor to stay out of the market for a drug? Antitrust policy implies that such a deal should be prohibited, but the answer becomes less clear when the transaction is packaged as a patent-litigation settlement. Since Congress passed the Hatch-Waxman Act, which encourages generic manufacturers to challenge pharmaceutical patent validity, settlements of this kind have been on the rise. Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission have condemned these agreements as anticompetitive and costly to American consumers, but none of these bodies has been able to …

Bringing Down Private Trade Barriers- An Assessment Of The United States' Unilateral Options: Section 301 Of The 1974 Trade Act And Extraterritorial Applications Of U.S. Antitrust Law, Aubry D. Smith

Michigan Journal of International Law

This note examines how the antitrust and trade law options operate, with the two-fold purpose of providing some idea of their potential effectiveness and also suggesting what limitations, if any, should be placed on their use. Parts I and II analyze the mechanics of applying the antitrust and Section 301 remedies to eliminate foreign trade-restrictive business practices. In light of this discussion of how the two processes work, Part III considers whether they are likely to get out of control and suggests how they ought to be restrained. Part III finds that Section 301 is subject to a number of …

Antitrust Policy After Chicago, Herbert Hovenkamp

Michigan Law Review

This article begins with the premise that nothing - not even an intellectual structure as imposing as the Chicago School - lasts forever. In fact, a certain amount of stagnation is already apparent. Most of the creative intellectual work of the Chicago School has already been done - done very well, to be sure. The new work too often reveals the signs of excessive self-acceptance, particularly of quiet acquiescence in premises that ought to be controversial.

Today the cutting edge of antitrust scholarship is coming, not from protagonists of the Chicago School, but rather from its critics. The critics began …

Determinants Of Foreign Plant Start-Ups In The United States: Lessons For Policymakers In The Southeast, Michael I. Luger, Sudhir Shetty

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This article examines the elasticity of DFI in relation to these promotional activities. It also analyzes the effect that agglomeration economies, urbanization economies, and labor market conditions have on DFI. Its specific focus is upon the effect that those four determinants had on new plant start-ups in three separate industries: drug manufacturing, industrial machinery, and motor vehicle production over the 1979-1983 period. (Those industries have been given standard industrial classification (SIC) numbers of 283, 355 + 356, and 371, respectively, by the U.S. Department of Commerce.) The industries are considered separately in order to test the hypothesis that the importance …

United Kingdom Regulation Of Transnational Corporate Concentration, J. Denys Gribbin

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article begins by describing the United Kingdom's policy toward outward and inward direct investment and then sets out the essentials of the competition laws that are among the major, nondiscriminatory regulatory mechanisms that affect corporate behavior and planning. The article also analyzes the development of competition policy as a microeconomic instrument along with its application to monopoly, oligopoly, and cartels involving transnational corporations. Competition policy, except for cartels, is shown to be relatively benign toward mergers until recently, and with respect to monopoly and oligopoly has sought remedies in regulation of prices and behavior rather than through structural change. …

Antitrust Law, Competition, And The Macroeconomy, Peter C. Carstensen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This article examines the links between antitrust law-one possible tool for dealing with economic ills-and macroeconomic structure. It analyzes the current policy and economic assumptions underlying the importance of antitrust enforcement in reaching a healthy, competitive economy and concludes that such enforcement does contribute to the increased effectiveness of macroeconomic tools.

Part I explores the current macroeconomic theories and their policy implications. Part II discusses the related concepts of market power and competition and concludes that dissipation of market power is preferable, but that the regulation of market power may yield significant social and economic benefits in the short run, …

Canadian Merger Policy And Its International Implications, Eric K. Gressman

Michigan Journal of International Law

The implications of Canadian merger policy are of deep concern to U.S. and other foreign investors who have invested or are considering investing in Canada. U.S. interests own 60 percent of Canada's manufacturing industry. In 1978, approximately 250 mergers in Canada involved a foreign-owned or foreign-controlled buyer (usually U.S.). Therefore, it is not surprising that Canada's merger policy is no less important to the decisions of foreign investors in Canada than the Justice Department's policies are to domestic investors in the United States. At the same time, the Canadian government and public are concerned with their merger policy as a …

Regulation Of Concentration Through Merger Control: Germany's Continuing Efforts, Kurt Stockmann

Michigan Journal of International Law

The Federal Republic of Germany's Law Against Restraints on Competition (the ARC), establishes an extensive regime for regulating market-dominating enterprises. Therefore, large corporations, both national and multinational, are the subject of particular scrutiny in the Federal Republic. Rather than identify and address all the provisions pertinent to corporate concentration (a task whose tedium would be matched only by its enormity), this analysis will undertake three tasks: (1) briefly describe the general scope of West German merger law, (2) discuss the application of the law to cases of transnational concentration, and (3) explain the proposed Fourth Amendment to the ARC as …

Regulating Multinational Corporate Concentration-The European Economic Community, John Temple Lang

Michigan Journal of International Law

It is the purpose of this article to discuss the policies and goals of the efforts of the European Communities to regulate multinational corporate concentration. For reasons that will become clear in the course of the article, it is necessary to start by outlining the means available to the European Communities, both presently and potentially, to promote these policies. It is not possible to see what those policies might be or how they are likely to develop without understanding the practical implications of the various legal rules on which the Community might rely in the future. This article does not …

Decision To Prosecute: Organization And Public Policy In The Antitrust Division, C. Paul Rogers, Iii

Vanderbilt Law Review

Professor Suzanne Weaver's first book, Decision To Prosecute: Organization and Public Policy in the Antitrust Division, is a study of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, its institutional behavior and its mechanisms for public policy formation.Although Professor Weaver's audience is not limited to the legal community, Decision To Prosecute will stimulate in two ways the interest of antitrust students, scholars, and practitioners. On one level, the reader will learn something about the internal operations of the Antitrust Division, and may reconsider his preformed judgments about that influential, trenchant branch of the Justice Department.

For H.R. Ii And S. Ii To Strengthen The Robinson-Patman Act And Amend The Antitrust Law Prohibiting Price Discrimination, Wright Patman M.C.

Vanderbilt Law Review

H. R. 11 and S. 11 are modest and simple legislative proposals.'They provide for no change in our antitrust laws prohibiting price discrimination except to limit somewhat the use of the "good faith" defense. The extent of this limitation goes no further than to assist the Act by providing that the "good faith" defense shall not operate as an absolute and complete bar to a proceeding by the Government against the practices of destructive price discrimination: In other words, those discriminations which would have the effect of substantially lessening competition and tending to create a monopoly may not be defended …