Law Commons^™

Slides: Lower Arkansas Valley Super Ditch Company, Inc.: Water Leasing Program, Peter Nichols

Evolving Regional Frameworks for Ag-to-Urban Water Transfers (December 11)

Presenter: Peter Nichols, General Counsel of the Lower Arkansas Valley “Super Ditch” Company, Trout, Raley, Montano, Witwer & Freeman PC, Colorado

33 slides

Toward A Unified Theory Of Access To Local Telephone Systems, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the most distinctive developments in telecommunications policy over the past few decades has been the increasingly broad array of access requirements regulatory authorities have imposed on local telephone providers. In so doing, policymakers did not fully consider whether the justifications for regulating telecommunications remained valid. They also allowed each access regime to be governed by its own pricing methodology and set access prices in a way that treated each network component as if it existed in isolation. The result was a regulatory regime that was internally inconsistent, vulnerable to regulatory arbitrage, and unable to capture the interactions among …

The Enduring Lessons Of The Breakup Of At&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

On April 18-19, 2008, the University of Pennsylvania Law School hosted a landmark conference on “The Enduring Lessons of the Breakup of AT&T: A Twenty-Five Year Retrospective.” This conference was the first major event for Penn’s newly established Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, a research institute committed to promoting basic research into foundational frameworks that will shape the way policymakers think about technology-related issues in the future. The breakup of AT&T represents an ideal starting point for reexamining the major themes of telecommunications policy that have emerged over the past quarter century. The conference featured a keynote address by …

Schumpeterian Competition And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Joseph Schumpeter's vision of competition saw it as a destructive process in which effort, assets and fortunes were continuously destroyed by innovation. One possible implication is that antitrust's attention on short-run price and output issues is myopic: what seems at first glance to be a monopolistic exclusionary practice might really be an innovative enterprise with enormous payoffs in the long run. While this may be the case, three qualifications are critical. First, one must not confuse the prospect of innovation with the scope of the intellectual property laws; their excesses and special interest capture cast serious doubt on the proposition …

Unilateral Refusals To Deal, Vertical Integration, And The Essential Facility Doctrine, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Where it applies, the essential facility doctrine requires a monopolist to share its "essential facility." Since the only qualifying exclusionary practice is the refusal to share the facility itself, the doctrine comes about as close as antitrust ever does to condemning "no fault" monopolization. There is no independent justification for an essential facility doctrine separate and apart from general Section 2 doctrine governing the vertically integrated monopolist's refusal to deal. In its Trinko decision the Supreme Court placed that doctrine about where it should be. The Court did not categorically reject all unilateral refusal to deal claims, but it placed …

The Antitrust Standard For Unlawful Exclusionary Conduct, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers the general definition of unlawful exclusionary practices under Section 2 of the Sherman Act as acts that: (1) are reasonably capable of creating, enlarging or prolonging monopoly power by impairing the opportunities of rivals; and (2) that either (2a) do not benefit consumers at all, or (2b) are unnecessary for the particular consumer benefits claimed for them, or (2c) produce harms disproportionate to any resulting benefits. An important purpose of this progression of queries is to permit the court to avoid balancing, although balancing certainly cannot be avoided in some close cases. The given definition is very …

Exclusionary Bundled Discounts And The Antitrust Modernization Commission, Erik Hovenkamp, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A bundled discount occurs when a seller charges less for a bundle of goods than for its components when sold separately. A characteristic of such discounting is that a rival who makes only one of the products in the bundle may have to give a larger per item discount in order to compensate the buyer for the foregone discount on goods that the rival does not sell. For example, if I sell A and B and offer a 20% discount only to customers who purchase one A and one B together, a rival in the B market might be able …