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Full-Text Articles in Law
Balancing Effects Across Markets, Daniel A. Crane
Balancing Effects Across Markets, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
In Philadelphia National Bank (PNB), the Supreme Court held that it is improper to weigh a merger's procompetitive effects in one market against the merger's anticompetitive effects in another. The merger in question, which ostensibly reduced retail competition in the Philadelphia area, could not be justified on the grounds that it increased competition against New York banks and hence perhaps enhanced competition in business banking in the mid-Atlantic region. I will refer to the Supreme Court's prohibition on balancing effects across markets as a "market-specificity" rule. Under this rule, efficiencies that may counterbalance anticompetitive aspects must be specific to …
Market Power Without Market Definition, Daniel A. Crane
Market Power Without Market Definition, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
Antitrust law has traditionally required proof of market power in most cases and has analyzed market power through a market definition/market share lens. In recent years, this indirect or structural approach to proving market power has come under attack as misguided in practice and intellectually incoherent. If market definition collapses in the courts and antitrust agencies, as it seems poised to do, this will rupture antitrust analysis and create urgent pressures for an alternative approach to proving market power through direct evidence. None of the leading theoretic approaches—such as the Lerner Index or a search for supracompetitive profits—provides a robust …
Obama's Antitrust Agenda, Daniel A. Crane
Obama's Antitrust Agenda, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
Antitrust law is back in vogue. After years in the wilderness, antitrust enforcement has reemerged as a hot topic in Washington and in the legal academy. In one heady week inMay of 2009, a frontpage story in the New York Times reported the dramatic decision of Christine Varney —theObama administration’s new AntitrustDivision head—to jettison the entire report onmonopolization offenses released by the Bush JusticeDepartment just eightmonths earlier. In a speech before the Center for American Progress, Varney announced that the Justice Department is “committed to aggressively pursuing enforcement of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.” As if to prove that …
Linkline's Institutional Suspicions, Daniel A. Crane
Linkline's Institutional Suspicions, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
Antitrust scholars are having fun again. Not so long ago, they were the poor, redheaded stepchildren of the legal academy, either pining for the older days of rigorous antitrust enforcement or trying to kill off what was left of the enterprise. Other law professors felt sorry for them, ignored them, or both. But now antitrust is making a comeback of sorts. In one heady week in May of 2009, a front-page story in the New York Times reported the dramatic decision of Christine Varney-the Obama Administration's new Antitrust Division head at the Department of Justice-to jettison the entire report on …
Attempts And Monopolization: A Mildly Expansionary Answer To The Prophylactic Riddle Of Section Two, Edward H. Cooper
Attempts And Monopolization: A Mildly Expansionary Answer To The Prophylactic Riddle Of Section Two, Edward H. Cooper
Articles
The efforts of activist antitrust lawyers to redefine the contours of attempted monopolization under section 2 of the Sherman Act1 have again forced the courts to wrestle with the classic antitrust dilemma: How far must single-firm competitive behavior be restrained to make competition free? The answer given by the majority of current decisions is that, absent some other established offense, single-firm behavior should be prohibited as an attempt to monopolize only when there is a specific intent to monopolize and the firm has come dangerously near to unlawful monopolization. A contemporary challenge to this orthodox answer is rapidly gaining force. …
The Commodity Clause Of The Hepburn Act, Edwin C. Goddard
The Commodity Clause Of The Hepburn Act, Edwin C. Goddard
Articles
The Supreme Court of the United States has added another to the interesting line of cases construing the so-called "Commodity Clause" of the HEPBURN ACT of 1906. In United States v. Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Co. and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Coal Co., decided on June 21, 1915, 35 Sup. Ct. 873, the court reversed the decree of the District Court as reported in 213 Fed. 240, and found the relation and contract between the Railroad Company and the Coal Company to be in violation of the HEPBURN ACT and the SHERMAN ACT.
The Standard Oil Decision: The Rule Of Reason, Horace Lafayette Wilgus
The Standard Oil Decision: The Rule Of Reason, Horace Lafayette Wilgus
Articles
After twenty-one years the Sherman Anti Trust Act has been applied to the typical combination restraining interstate commerce, which that act was designed to prevent.
Limits To State Control Of Private Business, Thomas M. Cooley
Limits To State Control Of Private Business, Thomas M. Cooley
Articles
The present purpose is to inquire whether, in the matter of the regulation of property rights and of business, legislation has not of late been occupying doubtful, possibly unconstitutional grounds. The discussion in the main must be limited to fundamental.-principles, aided by such light as legal and constitutional history may throw upon them, since the express provisions of the constitutions can give little assistance. They always contain the general guaranty of due process of law to life, liberty, and property, but in other particulars they for the most part leave protection to principles which have come from the common law. …