Litigation Commons^™

Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, like enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods LLC illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically …

The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust’s rule of reason was born out of a thirty-year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints among competitors was roughly established. Antitrust policy toward vertical restraints remained much more unstable, however, largely because their effects were so poorly understood.

This article provides a litigation field guide for antitrust claims under the rule of reason – or more precisely, for situations when application of the rule of reason is likely. At the time pleadings are drafted and even up …