Law Commons^™

Addressing The Divisions In Antitrust Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This is the text of an interview conducted in writing by Professor A. Douglas Melamed, Stanford Law School.

Antitrust In Times Of Information Technology: An Analysis Of Big Tech Monopoly Cases, Shamayeta Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The information technology industry is one of the most rapidly growing yet concentrated markets existing today. Big Tech monopolies and their increasingly anticompetitive behavior posits risks for competition, technological innovation and consumer welfare. This ranges from price discrimination, limiting consumer choices to the unethical use of data. The particular nature of information technology, with its network effects and negligible marginal costs, incentivizes and facilitates predatory market practices making antitrust analysis in this industry extremely complex. Certain schools of antitrust thought are more sensitive (namely the post-Chicago school) to these implications than others, though antitrust application is still lacking in both …

Whatever Did Happen To The Antitrust Movement?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust in the United States today is caught between its pursuit of technical rules designed to define and implement defensible economic goals, and increasing calls for a new antitrust “movement.” The goals of this movement have been variously defined as combating industrial concentration, limiting the economic or political power of large firms, correcting the maldistribution of wealth, control of high profits, increasing wages, or protection of small business. High output and low consumer prices are typically unmentioned.

In the 1960s the great policy historian Richard Hofstadter lamented the passing of the antitrust “movement” as one of the “faded passions of …

Capitalism And Unfreedom: Louis D. Brandeis And A Liberty Of The Left, Eric L. Apar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The American Right features a well-developed—and well-heeled—infrastructure for promoting a conception of freedom as inextricable from capitalism. The American Left, by contrast, has seemed content to cede the territory, abandoning the ground of freedom for the terrain of “equality,” “justice,” “fairness,” and “prosperity.” This paper is an effort to address this asymmetry in the public discourse over the meaning of freedom. Its principal objective is to capture the vision of freedom embodied in the political and economic thought of Louis D. Brandeis, one of the American Left’s ablest expositors of freedom.

In addition, the paper has three subsidiary objectives. The …

Progressive Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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A widely accepted model of American legal history is that "classical" legal thought, which dominated much of the nineteenth century, was displaced by "progressive" legal thought, which survived through the New Deal and in some form to this day. Within its domain, this was a revolution nearly on a par with Copernicus or Newton. This paradigm has been adopted by both progressive liberals who defend this revolution and by classical liberals who lament it.

Classical legal thought is generally identified with efforts to systematize legal rules along lines that had become familiar in the natural sciences. This methodology involved not …

The Wires Go To War: The U.S. Experiment With Government Ownership Of The Telephone System During World War I, Michael A. Janson, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the U.S. telephone system is that it has always been privately owned, in stark contrast to the pattern of government ownership followed by virtually every other nation. What is not widely known is how close the United States came to falling in line with the rest of the world. For the one-year period following July 31, 1918, the exigencies of World War I led the federal government to take over the U.S. telephone system. A close examination of this episode sheds new light into a number of current policy issues. The history confirms …

Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed To Repeat It?, Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, Christopher S. Yoo

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In The Master Switch, Tim Wu argues that four leading communications industries have historically followed a single pattern that he calls “the Cycle.” Because Wu’s argument is almost entirely historical, the cogency of its claims and the force of its policy recommendations depends entirely on the accuracy and completeness of its treatment of the historical record. Specifically, he believes that industries begin as open, only to be transformed into closed systems by a great corporate mogul until some new form of ingenuity restarts the Cycle anew. Interestingly, even taken at face value, many of the episodes described in the …

Truly Sovereign At Last: C.B.C. Distribution V. Mlb Am And The Redefinition Of The Concept Of Baseball, Mitchell J. Nathanson

Mitchell J Nathanson

This article is the second in the author’s series examining the interplay between baseball and the law (the first being The Sovereign Nation of Baseball: Why Federal Law Does Not Apply To “America’s Game” And How It Got That Way, 16 Vill. Sports & Ent. L.J. 49 (2009)). The Sovereign Nation of Baseball provided the groundwork for this series by discussing how federal courts have historically deferred to those who have traditionally run Major League Baseball (the office of the Commissioner of Baseball as well as the cabal of club owners), bending the rules that would otherwise dictate the resolution …

Major League Baseball As Enron: The True Meaning Of The Mitchell Report, Mitchell J. Nathanson

Mitchell J Nathanson

Although the December 13, 2007 release of the Mitchell Report received attention for the names of the players included within, what was overlooked by many was the true import of the report: namely, the indictment of Major League Baseball itself as a corrupt entity. As such, the players identified as steroid abusers within the report were merely reflections of the larger, systemic problem that existed for decades within MLB rather than the problem in and of themselves. This article examines this revelation in detail.

The Antitrust Movement And The Rise Of Industrial Organization, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The modern science of industrial organization grew out of a debate among lawyers and economists in the waning years of the nineteenth century. For Americans, the emergent business "trust" provoked a dialogue about how the law should respond. Many of the formal theories of industrial organization, such as the ruinous competition doctrine, the potential competition doctrine, and the post-classical concern about vertical integration, were actually borrowed from the law.

Anglo-American and European economists disputed the proper domain of theory and description in economic analysis. The British approach was exemplified Alfred and Mary Paley Marshall's Economics of Industry, published in …