Law Commons^™

Ip And Antitrust Policy: A Brief Historical Overview, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The history of IP/antitrust litigation is filled with exaggerated notions of the power conferred by IP rights and imagined threats to competition. The result is that antitrust litigation involving IP practices has seen problems where none existed. To be sure, finding the right balance between maintaining competition and creating incentives to innovate is no easy task. However, the judge in an IP/antitrust case almost never needs to do the balancing, most of which is done in the language of the IP provisions. The role of antitrust tribunals is the much more limited one of ensuring that any alleged threat to …

The Residency Match: Competitive Restraints In An Imperfect World, Kristin Madison

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Several years ago physicians filed a lawsuit alleging that “the match,” the more than fifty-year-old system by which medical students and other applicants are assigned to medical residency programs, violates Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Last year, without hearings or substantive debate on the issue, Congress found that the match was “highly efficient” and “pro-competitive” and granted a retroactive antitrust exemption for its operation. These seemingly incompatible views invite further analysis of the merits of the residency match from the perspective of public policy. This article considers the arguments of match advocates and critics, evaluating both theoretical models and …

Federalism And Antitrust Reform, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Currently the Antitrust Modernization Commission is considering numerous proposals for adjusting the relationship between federal antitrust authority and state regulation. This essay examines two areas that have produced a significant amount of state-federal conflict: state regulation of insurance and the state action immunity for general state regulation. It argues that no principle of efficiency, regulatory theory, or federalism justifies the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which creates an antitrust immunity for state regulation of insurance. What few benefits the Act confers could be fully realized by an appropriate interpretation of the state action doctrine. Second, the current formulation of the antitrust state action …

Discounts And Exclusions, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The discounting practices of dominant firms has emerged as one of the most problematic areas of private antitrust enforcement against single-firm conduct. The most difficult discount practices to assess are bundled, or multi-product discounts in situations where no significant rival produces every product that is included in the bundle. A debate has emerged over whether such discounts are properly assessed under a legal test that analogizes them to predatory pricing or to tying. Defendants typically prefer predatory pricing analogies, requiring a showing that the price of the assembled bundle was below a relevant measure of cost, such as marginal cost …

Unilateral Refusals To License In The Us, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Mark D. Janis, Mark A. Lemley

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Most antitrust claims relating to intellectual property involve challenges to agreements, licensing practices or affirmative conduct involving the use or disposition of the intellectual property rights or the products they cover. But sometimes an antitrust claim centers on an intellectual property owner's refusal to use or license an intellectual property right, perhaps coupled with efforts to enforce the intellectual property right against infringers. The allegation may be that the intellectual property right is so essential to competition that it must be licensed across the board, or that a refusal to license it to one particular party was discriminatory, or that …

Beyond Network Neutrality, Christopher S. Yoo

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In this Article, Professor Yoo takes issue with the emerging scholarly consensus in favor of ""network neutrality,"" which would prohibit network owners from employing proprietary protocols or entering into exclusivity agreements with content providers that would reduce the transparency of the Internet. Economic theory suggests that network neutrality advocates are focusing on the wrong policy problem. Rather than directing attention on the market for Internet content and applications, the segments of the industry that are the most competitive and the most likely to remain that way, communications policy would be better served if the focus were placed on the segment …

Architectural Censorship And The Fcc, Christopher S. Yoo

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Most First Amendment analyses of U.S. media policy have focused predominantly on “behavioral” regulation, which either prohibits the transmission of disfavored content (such as indecent programming) or mandates the dissemination of preferred content (such as children’s educational programming and political speech). In so doing, commentators have largely overlooked how program content is also affected by “structural” regulation, which focuses primarily on increasing the economic competitiveness of media industries. In this Article, Professor Christopher Yoo employs economic analysis to demonstrate how structural regulation can constitute a form of “architectural censorship” that has the unintended consequence of reducing the quantity, quality, and …

Institutional Competition To Regulate Corporations: A Comment On Macey, Jill E. Fisch

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No abstract provided.

Do Institutions Matter? The Impact Of The Lead Plaintiff Provision Of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, Stephen Choi, Jill E. Fisch, A. C. Pritchard

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When Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act in 1995 (“PSLRA”), the Act’s “lead plaintiff” provision was the centerpiece of its efforts to increase investor control over securities fraud class actions. The lead plaintiff provision alters the balance of power between investors and class counsel by creating a presumption that the investor with the largest financial stake in the case will serve as lead plaintiff. The lead plaintiff then chooses class counsel and, at least in theory, negotiates the terms of counsel’s compensation.

Congress’s stated purpose in enacting the lead plaintiff provision was to encourage institutional investors—pension funds, mutual …