Law Commons^™

Antitrust Error Costs, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The idea that consideration of error costs should inform judgments about actions with uncertain consequences is well established. When we act on imperfect information, we consider not only the probability of an event, but also the expected costs of making an error. In 1984 Frank Easterbrook used this idea to rationalize an anti-enforcement bias in antitrust, reasoning that markets are likely to correct monopoly in a relatively short time while judicial errors are likely to persist. As a result, false positives (recognizing a problem when there is none) are more costly than false negatives. While the problem of error cost …

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 …

Climate Justice, Daniel A. Farber

Daniel A Farber

Eric Posner and David Weisbach take the threat of climate change seriously. Their book Climate Change Justice offers policy prescriptions that deserve serious attention. While the authors adopt the framework of conventional welfare economics, they show a willingness to engage with noneconomic perspectives, which softens their conclusions. Although they are right to see a risk that overly aggressive ethical claims could derail international agreement on restricting greenhouse gases, their analysis makes climate justice too marginal to climate policy. The developed world does have a special responsibility for the current climate problem, and we should be willing both to agree to …

Climate Justice, Daniel A. Farber

Michigan Law Review

Eric Posner and David Weisbach take the threat of climate change seriously. Their book Climate Change Justice offers policy prescriptions that deserve serious attention. While the authors adopt the framework of conventional welfare economics, they show a willingness to engage with noneconomic perspectives, which softens their conclusions. Although they are right to see a risk that overly aggressive ethical claims could derail international agreement on restricting greenhouse gases, their analysis makes climate justice too marginal to climate policy. The developed world does have a special responsibility for the current climate problem, and we should be willing both to agree to …

Our Not-So-Great Depression, Craig Green

Michigan Law Review

A Failure of Capitalism by Richard Posner is not a great book, and it does not pretend to be one. Posner summarizes the economic crisis of 2008-09 and considers proposals to reduce current suffering and avoid future recurrence (p. xvi). But when the book's final edits were made in February 2009, it was still too soon for authoritative solutions or full accounts of what had happened. Instead, Posner wrote a conspicuously contemporary-and thus incomplete-description of the crisis as it looked to him at the time (p. xvii). Now one year later, readers may need a reminder about the value of …

The Illusion Of Law: The Legitimating Schemas Of Modern Policy And Corporate Law, Ronald Chen, Jon Hanson

Michigan Law Review

This Article is about some of the schemas and scripts that form and define our lives. It is about the knowledge structures that shape how we view the world and how we understand the limitless information with which we are always confronted. This Article is also about the "evolution of ideas" underlying corporate law and all of modern policymaking. It is about the ways in which schemas and scripts have influenced how policy theorists, policymakers, lawyers, and many others (particularly in the West) understand and approach policymaking generally and corporate law specifically. It is about both the invisibility and blinding …

Feminist Foundations For The Law Of Business: One Law And Economics Scholar's Survey And (Re)View, Barbara Ann White

All Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Essay is to suggest frameworks and modes of inquiry for applying feminist legal analysis to business law and the related theory of law and economics. It does so in two ways. One is to assess works already written by feminist scholars in the business law arena, highlighting how those contributions have begun to pave the way towards enriching the scope of business law analysis. The other is to offer two new roles for feminist jurisprudence. One role is to define just (that is, fair) distributions of rights and the other role is to define social judgments …

A Redrafted Section I Of The Sherman Act, Robert H. Heidt

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Risk-Utility Analysis And The Learned Hand Formula: A Hand That Helps Or A Hand That Hides?, Barbara Ann White

All Faculty Scholarship

Judicial inconsistencies in balancing costs against benefits in legal determinations, sometimes referred to as the Learned Hand Formula, indicate that the implications are not fully understood. The incorporation of more formal economic cost-benefit analysis by some courts has only served to increase the confusion and wariness about fostering such guidelines for social behavior.

This article's purpose is threefold. One is to demonstrate how the use of cost-benefit analysis necessarily imparts the moral and/or political values of the user into his or her decisions. While the cost-benefit technique is itself value-neutral, its application, as will be shown, requires that some moral …

The Problem Of Transaction Costs, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Micro-Microeconomic Approach To Antitrust Law: Games Managers Play, Harry S. Gerla

Michigan Law Review

If we are to gain an accurate perspective on the impact of antitrust laws and policies on the behavior of firms in the real world, we must adopt a micro-microeconomic approach which focuses not on how rational, profit-maximizing firms will theoretically behave, but upon how late twentieth-century American managers and executives actually behave. This article attempts to begin that task.

Part I of this article examines the justifications for focusing on individual managers rather than profit-maximizing firms as the key actors in antitrust law. Part II looks at contemporary management mores and practices and develops some generalized "rules of the …