Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Volume 09 (Part 1), District Court Of The United States For The Northern District Of Ohio, Eastern Division

City of Cleveland v. The Cleveland Illuminating Company, 1980

City of Cleveland, plaintiff vs. The Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, defendant : civil action no. C75-560; proceedings had before the Honorable Robert B. Krupansky of said court, commencing on Tuesday, September 2, 1980 in the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division

10/14/80-10/16/80

Antitrust Class Actions In The Wake Of Procedural Reform, Christine P. Bartholomew

Indiana Law Journal

What is the current vitality of antitrust enforcement? Antitrust class actions—the primary mode of competition oversight—has weathered two decades of procedural reform. This Article documents the effects of those reforms. Relying on an original dataset of over 1300 antitrust class action settlements, this Article finds such cases alive but far from well. Certain suits do succeed on an impressive scale, returning billions of dollars to victims. But class action reform has made antitrust enforcement narrower, more time-consuming, and costlier than only a decade ago. And, as this Article’s sources reveal, new battle lines are forming. Across the ...

The Broken Beef Cattle Industry: Cool, Covid And Cattletrace, Hayden L. Ballard

Journal of Food Law & Policy

While the Kansas City Stockyards themselves are gone, just like in the early 20th Century, a beef monopoly has once again found its way into the industry, and a way around the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 and is again suffocating the industry. While at the time of the act’s passage in 1921 five companies controlled the market, today the market is even more consolidated in the “Big Four,” as the four biggest meat packing companies in America are commonly known (Cargill, Tyson, JBS and National Beef/Marfrig), and are again arguably stifling the free-market. If Americans do ...

On Firms, Sanjukta Paul

Law & Economics Working Papers

This paper is about firms as an instance of economic coordination, and about how we think about them in relation to other forms of coordination as well as in relation to competition and markets. The dominant frame for thinking about firms--which has strongly influenced contemporary competition law as well as serving as a vital adjunct to the fundamental concepts of neoclassical price theory that guide many areas of law and policy--implicitly or explicitly explains and justifies the centralization of both decision-making rights and flows of income from economic activity on productive efficiency grounds. We have very good reasons to doubt ...

A Qualitative Look Into Repair Practices, Jumana Labib

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This research poster is based on a working research paper which moves beyond the traditional scope of repair and examines the Right to Repair movement from a smaller, more personal lens by detailing the 6 categorical impediments as dubbed by Dr. Alissa Centivany (design, law, economic/business strategy, material asymmetry, informational asymmetry, and social impediments) have continuously inhibited repair and affected repair practices, which has consequently had larger implications (environmental, economic, social, etc.) on ourselves, our objects, and our world. The poster builds upon my research from last year (see "The Right to Repair: (Re)building a better future"), this ...

Syarat Kebaruan Pada Desain Industri Sebagai Dasar Gugatan Pembatalan Desain Industri, Rizqi Tsaniati Putri

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Abstract

Intellectual Property Rights, including Industrial Design Rights, are an important matter to be protected especially in relation to the growing market development in the world and in Indonesia itself. Protection of Industrial Designs is needed to encourage creativity and as a form of protection and appreciation for Industrial Designs for its creators. In Indonesia, the protection of industrial designs is regulated based on Law Number 31 of 2000 concerning Industrial Designs. Even though Indonesia already has laws and regulations governing the Industrial Designs, there are still some things in the Law that still need to be clarified in order ...

Criminal Enforcement Of Section 2 Of The Sherman Act: An Empirical Assessment, Daniel A. Crane

Law & Economics Working Papers

The Biden Justice Department has announced that it may begin to bring criminal monopolization cases under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a practice that the Department has not employed in almost half a century. The Department's leadership has justified this idea by asserting that it used to be common practice for the Antitrust Division to bring such cases. This Article presents the findings of an empirical study of all of the Justice Department's antitrust case filings. It finds that the Justice Depart brought 175 criminal monopolization cases between 1903 and 1977, but that only 20 of these ...

Hair On Fire: Why Companies Are Less Likely To Feel The Burn Under The Doj’S Newest Change To Antitrust Enforcement, Caroline M. Whitener

Pepperdine Law Review

In July 2019, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division announced that in an effort to help companies avoid “‘hair on fire’ experiences,” Division prosecutors are now, despite previous hesitancy, encouraged to offer prosecution alternatives in the form of deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and non-prosecution agreements (NPAs) to corporate antitrust violators. Alternative prosecution agreements, such as DPAs and NPAs, are contracts between the government and corporate wrongdoers that allow companies to delay or entirely avoid prosecution, provided the company adheres to the contract terms. Additionally, as a part of the policy change, DOJ antitrust prosecutors must evaluate a corporation’s ...

A Continental Rift? The United States And European Union's Contrasting Approaches To Regulating The Monopolistic Behavior Of Gatekeeper Platforms, Peter R. Enia

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Over the past decade, gatekeeper platforms, such as Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon), have created highly monopolistic business models to benefit themselves while undermining third-party merchants on digital marketplaces. To illustrate, Amazon collects third-party merchant and consumer data on its marketplace to improve its private-label brands while simultaneously selling them alongside third-party merchant products, creating a significant conflict of interest business model. To address this anticompetitive behavior, the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (E.U.) have proposed contrasting approaches. The U.S., through the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, offers a structural separation remedy, giving the Department of Justice ...

The Slogans And Goals Of Antitrust Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This is a comparative examination of the slogans and goals most advocated for antitrust law today – namely, that antitrust should be concerned with “bigness,” that it should intervene when actions undermine the “competitive process,” or that it should be concerned about promoting some conception of welfare. “Bigness” as an antitrust concern targets firms based on absolute size rather than share of a market, as antitrust traditionally has done. The bigness approach entails that antitrust cannot be concerned about low prices, or the welfare of consumers and labor. Nondominant firms could not sustain very high prices or cause significant reductions in ...

Bardy Diagnostics V. Hill-Rom: New Lessons On Material Adverse Effect Clauses, Robert T. Miller

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In Bardy Diagnostics, Inc. v. Hill-Rom, Inc., the Delaware Court of Chancery once again had to apply a Material Adverse Effect clause to determine whether an acquirer was required to close an acquisition. The case develops the law of MAEs in several important ways. First, the agreement between the parties substituted for the customary MAE objects (e.g., the company’s business, financial condition, and results of operations) a bespoke defined term. The court interpreted the definition of that term in a way that made it functionally equivalent to more customary MAE objects; then, consistent with an unacknowledged trend in ...

Freeing Cryptoassets From Howey: A Defense Of Genuine Token Offering, Kathryn A. Daly

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is the most powerful regulator of the U.S. securities market and serves to “protect investors; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and facilitate capital formation.” The agency’s task of protecting retail investors and regulating market participants has been, at times, reduced to a binary choice between “Main Street” investors and “Wall Street” insiders. Some regulators and legislators rely on this binary to put pressure on cryptoassets, claiming that more regulation leads to more effective investor protections. This Note rejects that premise. Genuine tokens offerings (i.e., unregistered security offerings not designed to defraud ...

The Abuse Of Offsets As Procompetitive Justification: Restoring The Proper Role Of Efficiencies After Ohio V. American Express And Ncaa V. Alston, Ted Tatos, Hal Singer

Georgia State University Law Review

Under the rule-of-reason framework, litigation involving the NCAA has condoned the practice of crediting purported benefits to one group as an “offset” to antitrust injury suffered by another. Although the Ohio v. American Express decision addressed countervailing effects on merchants versus cardholders within the same two-sided market (credit cards), NCAA v. Alston, consistent with the 1986 NCAA v. Board of Regents decision, acknowledged procompetitive justifications that occur in an entirely different market (the output market for viewing sporting events) than the market in which harm occurred (the labor market for college athletes). Both cases elevated the welfare of consumers above ...

Cognitive Foreclosure, Peter O'Loughlin

Georgia State University Law Review

Digital markets now fundamentally intertwine with our social and economic lives. International enforcement actions—the United States (U.S.) and European Union (E.U.) Google cases in particular—demonstrate from a behavioral economic perspective how digital platforms may be beginning to implicate antitrust’s two most fundamental doctrinal components—conduct and market power—in nuanced ways. In short, the regulatory and policy landscape showcases that we may be moving closer towards an antitrust world whereby firms can manipulate consumers’ psychological shortcomings to foreclose competition—a new form of nefarious conduct that might appropriately be termed “cognitive foreclosure.” Yet as a ...

Coppa And Educational Technologies: The Need For Additional Online Privacy Protections For Students, Diana S. Skowronski

Georgia State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

A New Antitrust Framework To Protect Mom And Pop From Big Tech, Cara Macdonald

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

While the economy declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, big technology companies like Amazon and Oracle experienced unprecedented growth and influence. Critics argue big technology companies are finding this level of success in-part due to anticompetitive practices. The crux of the debate rests on whether current, traditional antitrust laws are sufficient to cope with big technology companies. Some theorists argue that current laws are adequate, while others assert that antitrust laws are insufficient to regulate big technology companies because they are so different from the types of companies antitrust laws were designed to regulate. This article concludes that big tech companies ...

International Trade, Theodore P. Brackemyre, Tessa V. Capeloto, Sylvia Y. Chen, Dharmendra Choudhary, Kenneth C. Daines, Jeffrey O. Frank, Cynthia C. Galvez, Geoffrey Goodale, Sahar Hafeez, Michael P. House, Bernd G. Janzen, Elizabeth S. Lee, Usha Neelakantan, Devin S. Sikes, David J. Townsend, Daniel Wilson, Shuaiqi Yuan

The Year in Review

No abstract provided.

International Antitrust, Miguel Del Pino, Elizabeth Avery, Arda Reznikas, Bruno Drago, Paola Pugliese, Milena Mundim, Adam S. Goodman, Simon Kupi, Peter Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Laurie-Ann Grelier, Peter Camesasca, Naval Satarawala Chopra, Aman Singh Sethi, Shigeyoshi Ezaki, Youngjin Jung, Luke Shin, Gene-Oh Kim, Lara Grenville, Jonathan Tickner, Jasvinder Nakhwal, Lisl Dunlap, Shoshana Speiser

The Year in Review

No abstract provided.

Customs Law, Luis F. Arandia, D. "Bonni" Van Blarcom, James Feroli, Greg Kanargelidis, Daniel L. Kiselbach, Kathleen M. Murphy, Matt Nakachi, Rebecca Rodriquez, Brian K. Rowlands, Zachary Silver

The Year in Review

No abstract provided.

Ftc V. Qualcomm And The Need To Reboot Antitrust Goals, Beatriz Del Chiaro Da Rosa

University of Miami Business Law Review

The antitrust community is facing a demanding question: Is antitrust enforcement ultimately about protecting consumers, competition, or both? This question has sparked debates about the ultimate goals of antitrust law. On one side of the debate, supporters of the consumer welfare standard; and on the other side, supporters of the Neo-Brandeisian standard of enforcement. At this crucial time in the debate of overarching antitrust goals, the Ninth Circuit’s holding in Federal Trade Commission v. Qualcomm Incorporated, one of the most important antitrust cases in the twenty-first century, poses many issues for the consumer welfare standard and antitrust enforcement in ...