Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Taking Antitrust Away From The Courts, Ganesh Sitaraman

Ganesh Sitaraman

A small number of firms hold significant market power in a wide variety of sectors of the economy, leading commentators across the political spectrum to call for a reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement. But the antitrust agencies have been surprisingly timid in response to this challenge, and when they have tried to assert themselves, they have often found that hostile courts block their ability to foster competitive markets. In other areas of law, Congress delegates power to agencies, agencies make regulations setting standards, and courts provide deferential review after the fact. Antitrust doesn’t work this way. Courts – made up of ...

Investor-State Dispute Settlement: Human Rights And Regulatory Lessons From "Lilly V. Canada", Daniel J. Gervais

Daniel J Gervais

The triangular interface between trade, intellectual property (IP) and human rights has yet to be fully formed, both doctrinally and normatively. Adding investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) to the mix increases the complexity of the equations to solve. Two resultant issues are explored in this Article. First, the Article considers ways in which broader public policy objectives—in particular the protection of human rights—can and should be factored into determinations of whether a state’s action is compatible with its trade obligations and commitments in the state-to-state dispute settlement context. Second, the Article examines whether doctrinal tools used in state-to-state ...

Making Meaning: Towards A Narrative Theory Of Statutory Interpretation And Judicial Justification, Randy D. Gordon

Randy D. Gordon

The act of judging is complex involving finding facts, interpreting law, and then deciding a particular dispute. But these are not discreet functions: they bleed into one another and are thus interdependent. This article aims to reveal-at least in part-how judges approach this process. To do so, I look at three sets of civil RICO cases that align and diverge from civil antitrust precedents. I then posit that the judges in these cases base their decisions on assumptions about RICO's purpose. These assumptions, though often tacit and therefore not subject to direct observation, are nonetheless sometimes revealed when a ...

Platforms And The Rule Of Reason: The American Express Case, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

In Ohio v. American Express Co., the Supreme Court applied antitrust’s rule of reason to a two-sided platform. The challenge was to an “anti-steering” rule, a vertical restraint preventing merchants from shifting customers who offered an AmEx card from to a less costly alternative such as Visa or Mastercard.

A two-sided platform is a business that depends on relationships between two different, noncompeting groups of transaction partners. For example, a printed periodical such as a newspaper earns revenue by selling both advertising and subscriptions to the paper itself. Success depends on a platform’s ability to maintain the appropriate ...

The Eyes Of The World Are Watching You Now: Colin Kaepernick's Collusion Suit Against The Nfl, Matthew Mcelvenny

Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Common Ownership And Executive Incentives: The Implausibility Of Compensation As An Anticompetitive Mechanism, David Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Mutual funds, pension funds and other institutional investors are a growing presence in U.S. equity markets, and these investors frequently hold large stakes in shares of competing companies. Because these common owners might prefer to maximize the values of their portfolios of companies, rather than the value of individual companies in isolation, this new reality has lead to a concern that companies in concentrated industries with high degrees of common ownership might compete less vigorously with each other than they otherwise would. But what mechanism would link common ownership with reduced competition? Some commentators argue that one of the ...

Duty Or No Duty? That Is The Question: The Second Circuit Reasserts That A Violation Of Item 303'S Duty To Disclose Can Establish Liability Under Section 10(B), Rebecca Rabinowitz

Boston College Law Review

On March 29, 2016, in Indiana Public Retirement Systems v. SAIC, Inc., the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reaffirmed its earlier conclusion that a violation of the duty to disclose imposed on publicly traded companies by Item 303 of Regulation S-K can constitute a violation of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. In so doing, the Second Circuit directly conflicted with a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Cohen v. NVIDIA Corp. (In re NVIDIA Corp. Securities Litigation), despite the fact that both courts relied upon ...

Creatures Of Habit: Predictions About Delaware’S Future Treatment Of Disclosure Only Settlements And What It Means For Plaintiffs’ Attorneys Seeking A Pay Day, Peter Diliberti

Boston College Law Review

Scholars agree that in order for states to either obtain or maintain the business of corporate merger litigation, they must engage in competition with one another. Delaware has participated in this competition in the past to maintain its position as the country’s leading forum for corporate merger litigation. One of the most prominent aspects of this type of litigation is the “disclosure only settlement.” In the 2016 case In re Trulia, the Delaware Court of Chancery broke from a well-established precedent of approving disclosure only settlements and indicated it would be applying a heightened level of scrutiny to them ...

Modernizing The Stockholder Shield: How Blockchains And Distributed Ledgers Could Rescue The Appraisal Remedy, Brandon Ferrick

Boston College Law Review

A recent wave of appraisal litigation has highlighted costly flaws in Delaware’s appraisal law. The genesis of the problems stems from dilapidated assumptions about stock ownership and corporate record keeping baked into the Delaware General Corporation Law. Technological advancements, namely distributed ledgers and blockchain technology, promise to bring Delaware’s appraisal law into the twenty-first century while remaining consistent with existing appraisal law. Distributed ledgers and blockchain technology promise lightning fast clearing times, infallible record keeping, and cost-efficient modes of transfer. States, private actors, and laypersons are already recognizing the litany of benefits offered by these technologies. This Note ...

Antitrust Overreach: Undoing Cooperative Standardization In The Digital Economy, Jonathan M. Barnett

University of Southern California Legal Studies Working Paper Series

Information technology markets in general, and wireless communications markets in particular, rely on standardization mechanisms to develop interoperable devices for rapid and secure data processing, storage and transmission. From 2G through the emergent 5G standard, wireless communications markets have largely achieved standardization through cooperative multi-firm arrangements that likely outperform the historically dominant alternatives of government monopoly, which is subject to informational deficits and regulatory capture, and private monopoly, which suffers from pricing and other distortions inherent to protected market positions. This cooperative process has successfully relied on a mix of reasonably secure patents, quasi-contractual licensing commitments supplemented by reputational discipline ...

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Labor Law, Antitrust Law, And Economics Professors' Comment On The National Labor Relations Board's Proposed Joint-Employer Rule, Hiba Hafiz, Brishen Rogers, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt, Kate Bronfenbrenner

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Comment drafted to the National Labor Relations Board's request for comment on a proposed rule-making to define what constitutes a "joint employer" for the purposes of the National Labor Relations Act's strictures.

The Power Of Ranking: The Ease Of Doing Business Indicator And Global Regulatory Behavior, Rush Doshi, Judith G. Kelley, Beth A. Simmons

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

The proliferation of Global Performance Indicators (GPIs), especially those that rate and rank states against one another, shapes decisions of states, investors, bureaucrats, and voters. This power has not been lost on the World Bank, which has marshaled the Ease of Doing Business (EDB) index to amass surprising influence over global regulatory policies – a domain over which it has no explicit mandate and for which there is ideological contestation. This paper demonstrates how the World Bank’s EDB ranking system affects policy through bureaucratic, transnational, and domestic-political channels. We use observational and experimental data to show that states respond to ...

Procedural Fairness In Antitrust Enforcement: The U.S. Perspective, Christopher S. Yoo, Hendrik M. Wendland

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

Due process and fairness in enforcement procedures represent a critical aspect of the rule of law. Allowing greater participation by the parties and making enforcement procedures more transparent serve several functions, including better decisionmaking, greater respect for government, stronger economic growth, promotion of investment, limits corruption and politically motivated actions, regulation of bureaucratic ambition, and greater control of agency staff whose vision do not align with agency leadership or who are using an enforcement matter to advance their careers. That is why such distinguished actors as the International Competition Network (ICN), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the ...

In Re Lipitor Antitrust Litigation: The Third Circuit's Prescription For Judicial Reviewability Of Reverse Payment Settlements, John Miraglia

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 ...

Is Antitrust's Consumer Welfare Principle Imperiled?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

Antitrust’s consumer welfare principle stands for the proposition that antitrust policy should encourage markets to produce output as high as is consistent with sustainable competition, and prices that are accordingly as low. Such a policy does not protect every interest group. For example, it opposes the interests of cartels or other competition-limiting associations who profit from lower output and higher prices. It also runs counter to the interest of less competitive firms that need higher prices in order to survive. Market structure is relevant to antitrust policy, but its importance is contingent rather than absolute – that is, market structure ...

Copyright Arbitrage, Kristelia A. Garcia

Articles

Regulatory arbitrage—defined as the manipulation of regulatory treatment for the purpose of reducing regulatory costs or increasing statutory earnings—is often seen in heavily regulated industries. An increase in the regulatory nature of copyright, coupled with rapid technological advances and evolving consumer preferences, have led to an unprecedented proliferation of regulatory arbitrage in the area of copyright law. This Article offers a new scholarly account of the phenomenon herein referred to as “copyright arbitrage.”

In some cases, copyright arbitrage may work to expose and/or correct for an extant gap or inefficiency in the regulatory regime. In other cases ...

Five Principles For Vertical Merger Enforcement Policy, Jonathan B. Baker, Nancy L. Rose, Steven C. Salop, Fiona Scott Morton

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There seems to be consensus that the Department of Justice’s 1984 Vertical Merger Guidelines do not reflect either modern theoretical and empirical economic analysis or current agency enforcement policy. Yet widely divergent views of preferred enforcement policies have been expressed among agency enforcers and commentators. Based on our review of the relevant economic literature and our experience analyzing vertical mergers, we recommend that the enforcement agencies adopt five principles: (i) The agencies should consider and investigate the full range of potential anticompetitive harms when evaluating vertical mergers; (ii) The agencies should decline to presume that vertical mergers benefit competition ...

Energy Competition: From Commodity To Boutique & Back, James W. Coleman

Faculty Scholarship

Energy products such as power, gas, and oil have long been the world’s premier commodities. Consumers demand that power and fuel are available when they want it and they prefer to pay less for it. Few know or care where their fuel or power comes from. So for years energy companies believed that efforts to differentiate their products were mostly ineffective — they were re-signed to compete on price in fierce global commodity markets. But in recent years, a new focus on regulating how energy commodities are produced has begun to splinter previously integrated energy markets, creating markets for boutique ...