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The Second Dimension Of The Supreme Court, Joshua B. Fischman, Tonja Jacobi
The Second Dimension Of The Supreme Court, Joshua B. Fischman, Tonja Jacobi
Tonja Jacobi
Describing the justices of the Supreme Court as ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ has become so standard—and the left-right division on the Court is considered so entrenched—that any deviation from that pattern is treated with surprise. Attentive Court watchers know that the justices are not just politicians in robes, deciding each case on a purely ideological basis. Yet the increasingly influential empirical legal studies literature assumes just that—that a left-right ideological dimension fully describes the Supreme Court. We show that there is a second, more legally-focused dimension of judicial decision-making. A continuum between legalism and pragmatism also divides the justices, in ways …
Recognizing The Limits Of Antitrust: The Roberts Court Versus The Enforcement Agencies, Thomas A. Lambert, Alden F. Abbott
Recognizing The Limits Of Antitrust: The Roberts Court Versus The Enforcement Agencies, Thomas A. Lambert, Alden F. Abbott
Thomas A. Lambert
As Judge Frank Easterbrook famously explained three decades ago, antitrust is an inherently limited body of law. In crafting and enforcing liability rules to combat market power and encourage competition, courts and regulators may err in two directions: they may wrongly forbid output-enhancing behavior or wrongly fail to condemn output-reducing conduct. The social losses from false convictions and false acquittals, taken together, comprise antitrust’s “error costs.” While it may be possible to reduce error costs by making liability rules more nuanced, added complexity raises the “decision costs” incurred by business planners (ex ante) and adjudicators (ex post …