Legal History Commons^™

The Post-Chicago Antitrust Revolution: A Retrospective, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

A symposium examining the contributions of the post-Chicago School provides an appropriate opportunity to offer some thoughts on both the past and the future of antitrust. This afterword reviews the excellent papers with an eye toward appreciating the contributions and limitations of both the Chicago School, in terms of promoting the consumer welfare standard and embracing price theory as the preferred mode of economic analysis, and the post-Chicago School, with its emphasis on game theory and firm-level strategic conduct. It then explores two emerging trends, specifically neo-Brandeisian advocacy for abandoning consumer welfare as the sole goal of antitrust and the …

Predatory Pricing Under The Areeda-Turner Test, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Few works of legal scholarship have had the impact enjoyed by Areeda and Turner's 1975 article on predatory pricing. Proof of predatory pricing under the Areeda-Turner test requires two things. The plaintiff must show a market structure such that the predator could rationally foresee "recouping the losses through higher profits earned in the absence of competition." This requirement, typically called "recoupment," requires the plaintiff to show that, looking from the beginning of the predation campaign, the predator can reasonably anticipate that the costs of predation will be more than offset by the present value of a future period of monopoly …

Merger Policy And The 2010 Merger Guidelines, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

New Horizontal Merger Guidelines were issued jointly by the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission in August, 2010, replacing Guidelines issued in 1992 that no longer reflected either the law or government enforcement policy. The new Guidelines are a striking improvement. They are less technocratic, accommodating a greater and more realistic variety of theories about why mergers of competitors can be anticompetitive and, accordingly, a greater variety of methodologies for assessing them.

The unifying theme of the Horizontal Merger Guidelines is to prevent the enhancement of market power that might result from mergers. The 2010 Guidelines state that “[a] …

Guilds, Laws, And Markets For Manufactured Merchandise In Late-Medieval England, Gary Richardson

Gary Richardson

The prevailing paradigm of medieval manufacturing presumes guilds monopolized markets for durable goods in late-medieval England. The sources of the monopolies are said to have been the charters of towns, charters of guilds, parliamentary statutes, and judicial precedents. This essay examines those sources, demonstrates they did not give guilds legal monopolies in the modern sense of the word, and replaces that erroneous assumption with an accurate description of the legal institutions underlying markets for manufactures in medieval England.