Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Rule Or Reason? The Role Of Balancing In Antitrust Law, Michael A. Carrier, Mark A. Lemley

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

In this Essay, we argue that the proper test for antitrust’s rule of reason is a four-step, burden-shifting framework that ends with a balancing of the likely harms and benefits of particular conduct. One reason balancing has become rare even in circuits that permit it is that it seems hard. Antitrust is shot through with economic theory and evidence, and courts aren’t experts in economics. So they tend to look for shortcuts that allow them to resolve the case without having to apply that economic evidence to assess the likely net effect of a defendant’s conduct. But those shortcuts themselves …

The Last Great American Dynasties: Lessons In Monopoly Prevention From Mergers In Entertainment And Aviation, Margaret Bibby

Journal of Legislation

On November 1, 2022, Taylor Swift first announced The Eras Tour. The pent-up demand for a Taylor Swift concert was massive: she had not toured since the Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018, the Lover Fest Tour set for 2020 was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and her streaming numbers and popularity were higher than ever. The Eras Tour announcement stated that Ticketmaster would be the sole ticketing platform, and 3.5 million fans, known as “Swifties,” registered for a chance to purchase tickets. When presale opened on November 15, 2022, disaster struck for millions of fans. Swifties were met with …

Why We Need A Merger Cap: An Antitrust Lesson From General Electric, Carl T. Bogus

Journal of Legislation

This Article makes a modest proposal from a radical perspective. The proposal is this: Once a firm reaches a certain size, it should be prohibited from growing larger through mergers or acquisitions. The radical perspective is that antitrust law should be concerned with corporate size. It was a century ago that Louis D. Brandeis coined the term “curse of bigness,” and his concern about the social and political consequences of corporate size has long since fallen out of favor. Today, the consensus view is that antitrust should be concerned exclusively with economics. Current doctrine allows corporations to merge, provided only …

A Remedy-Centered Approach To Antitrust, John O. Mcginnis, Grace Stippich

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article advocates for a remedy-centered approach to antitrust law, placing remedial concerns at the forefront of antitrust analysis. It asserts that the limits of effective remedies should fundamentally shape the scope of antitrust liability. Drawing on the “nirvana fallacy” from economic theory, the Article argues that antitrust should only intervene when a judicial remedy can reliably improve upon market conditions. If no such remedy exists, liability should not be imposed. The Article further demonstrates how remedial considerations already play a significant, if often unrecognized, role in antitrust doctrines, including the definitions of “agreement,” monopolists’ duties to deal, and the …

Tying Law For The Digital Age, Daniel A. Crane

Notre Dame Law Review

Tying arrangements, a central concern of antitrust policy since the early days of the Sherman and Clayton Acts, have come into renewed focus with respect to the practices of dominant technology companies. Unfortunately, tying law’s doctrinal structure is a self-contradictory and incoherent wreck. A conventional view holds that this mess is due to errant Supreme Court precedents, never fully corrected, that expressed hostility to tying based on faulty economic understanding. That is only part of the story. Examination of tying law’s origins and development shows that tying doctrine was built on a now-dated paradigm of what constitutes a tying arrangement. …

Against Secondary Meaning, Jeanne C. Fromer

Notre Dame Law Review

Trademark law premises protection and scope of marks on secondary meaning, which is established when a mark develops sufficient association to consumers with a business as a source of goods or services in addition to the mark’s linguistic primary meaning. In recent years, scholars have proposed that secondary meaning plays an even more central role in trademark law than it already does. Yet enshrining secondary meaning in the law undermines the ultimate goals of trademark law: promoting fair competition and protecting consumers. The dangers of enshrining secondary meaning include the problematic doctrine that has built up to assess it or …

Note: Trust In The Digital Marketplace: Amazon, Third-Party Sellers, And Informational Fiduciaries, Jesse-Paul Crane

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

The rise of e-commerce has created a number of online marketplaces where digital platforms connect buyers and sellers. Consumers use platforms like Amazon, Etsy, Instacart, Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb to purchase goods and services from third parties while the platform itself takes a fee for operating the marketplace. Online platforms are not the only businesses that use such a “two-sided” marketplace model. The Supreme Court recently addressed antitrust concerns in this type of marketplace in Ohio v. Am. Express Co. 1 Two-sided markets invoke a number of novel legal issues that impact both those who buy and sell over them, …

The Bipartisan Consensus On Big Tech, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

This Article contends that there is an emergent bipartisan consensus that Big Tech has grown too powerful and that action must be taken to address its abuse of power. That action takes the form of a variety of legislative proposals to enhance government enforcement powers, reform the merger laws, and address self-preferencing, data portability, and interoperability. Litigation efforts focus on Facebook and Google’s abuse of monopoly power, particularly with respect to Facebook’s elimination of competition through acquisitions and Google’s abuse of monopoly power in search and display advertising. While we are in the midst of one of the most divisive …

Note: Improving The Defend Trade Secrets Act Of 2016: Against Preempting State Trade Secret Law, Victoria Hanson

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

In order to better protect companies from losing their valuable trade secrets and prevent irreparable harm, Congress enacted the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA),8 the first federal civil protection given for trade secrets. In this paper, I argue that the DTSA has indeed not met its supposed goals, but the solution does not lie in preempting state law. Firstly, I explain the history, goals, and provisions of the DTSA and how it has failed to meet the original goals over the past three years. Secondly, I explain the argument for the DTSA to preempt state law and its …

Antitrust Antitextualism, Daniel A. Crane

Notre Dame Law Review

Judges and scholars frequently describe antitrust as a common-law system predicated on open-textured statutes, but that description fails to capture a historically persistent phenomenon: judicial disregard of the plain meaning of the statutory texts and manifest purposes of Congress. This pattern of judicial nullification is not evenly distributed: when the courts have deviated from the plain meaning or congressional purpose, they have uniformly done so to limit the reach of antitrust liability or curtail the labor exemption to the benefit of industrial interests. This phenomenon cannot be explained solely or even primarily as a tug-of-war between a progressive Congress and …

The Role Of "Commercial Morality" In Trade Secret Doctrine, Lynda J. Oswald

Notre Dame Law Review

The approaching anniversary of E.I. duPont deNemours & Co. v. Christopher is the impetus for this exploration and evaluation of the role of “commercial morality” in trade secret misappropriation doctrine. Christopher is the well-known industrial espionage case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that flying an airplane over an under-construction manufacturing facility to take photos of briefly-but-inevitably exposed trade secrets was an “improper means” of accessing a trade secret and was contrary to standards of “commercial morality.”

Commercial morality has played a significant but shifting role in trade secret law over the past seven …

From Humphrey's Executor To Seila Law: Ending Dual Federal Antitrust Authority, Alyson M. Cox

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note catalogues and proposes solutions to both the traditional concerns of efficiency and fairness and the modern constitutional problems posed by the current dual enforcement structure. Part I will compare the two antitrust agencies on the basis of their structures, accountability, statutory authority, and enforcement procedures, as well as evaluate potential concerns with vesting either agency with the sole authority to enforce civil antitrust laws. Part II will evaluate the perils of the current dual enforcement structure, exploring both the traditional arguments about efficiency and fairness and the modern constitutional challenges. Part III will evaluate potential legislative solutions to …

Behavioral Lessons For Antitrust Enforcement, Avishalom Tor

Faculty Lectures and Presentations

These are lecture slides to accompany a virtual lecture.

Avishalom Tor, professor and director of the Research Program on Law and Market Behavior at Notre Dame Law School, delivered this lecture to lawyers and economists of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division in Washington D.C. and throughout the country in the summer of 2020.

The lecture provides a systematic review of the lessons empirical behavioral findings offer to antitrust law, enforcement, and policy. Professor Tor introduces key findings of behavioral antitrust and explores their implications for doctrine and enforcement across the field, in areas ranging from horizontal restraints, through …

The Race To The Middle, William Magnuson

Notre Dame Law Review

How does federalism affect the quality of law? It is one of the fundamental questions of our constitutional system. Scholars of federalism generally fall into one of two camps on the question. One camp argues that regulatory competition between states leads to a “race to the bottom,” in which states adopt progressively worse laws in order to pander to powerful constituencies. The other camp, conversely, argues that regulatory competition leads to a “race to the top,” incentivizing states to adopt progressively better laws in the search for more desirable outcomes for their constituencies. Despite their apparent differences, however, both the …

How To Approach Market Definition After Ohio V. American Express, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Technological developments have introduced new methods of buying and selling goods and services. These advancements often times take the form of two-sided platforms. While these platforms increase overall social utility, they also present a host of challenges to antitrust enforcement. One such challenge is defining the appropriate market in cases involving actions that are not illegal per se. That task has been made more difficult with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ohio v. American Express Co. (“Amex”).2 Moving forward, one of the critical questions Amex presents is how to define the product market in the context of two-sided platforms.

Promoting International Procedural Norms In Competition Law Enforcement, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

It is a pleasure to participate in the 2019 Kansas Law Review Symposium, "Antitrust Law and Policy in the 21st Century." Antitrust is once again a hot topic and discussion about how to effectively enforce the laws in a digital age is generating widespread attention. My focus will be on the topic of promoting fundamental due process in competition law investigation and enforcement. With competition authorities around the globe becoming increasingly more active, it is one of the most important topics on the antitrust agenda. And this year, we witnessed a watershed moment with the adoption of a new framework …

Broadening Consumer Law: Competition, Protection, And Distribution, Rory Van Loo

Notre Dame Law Review

Policymakers and scholars have in distributional conversations traditionally ignored consumer laws, defined as the set of consumer protection, antitrust, and entry-barrier laws that govern consumer transactions. Consumer law is overlooked partly because tax law is cast as the most efficient way to redistribute. Another obstacle is that consumer law research speaks to microeconomic and siloed contexts—deceptive fees by Wells Fargo or a proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Even removing millions of dollars of deceptive credit card fees across the nation seems trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent decades. …

Antitrust Violations As Private Enforcement, Abby L. Timmons

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

On the whole, the dismantling of monopolies relies heavily on public enforcement. While the opportunity for private enforcement exists in the antitrust context, it is limited, as not all so-called "monopolies" commit antitrust violations. For example, where barriers to entry in a particular industry are high—such as in the case of phone carriers or airlines, both of which must build an infrastructure to support their business—sufficient competition may not exist to create options for the consumer. In situations like these, the federal government generally must step in to break up the monopoly. However, this interference happens infrequently, and these efforts …

Lane Violation: Why The Ncaa's Amateurism Rules Have Overstepped Antitrust Protection & How To Correct, Alexander Knuth

Notre Dame Law Review Reflection

The NCAA is in the midst of an era that will define the future of collegiate athletics and determine how young people participate in sports for the foreseeable future. This Essay ultimately concludes that both the NCAA and its athletes would benefit from a system that allows for the exploitation of athletes' name, image, or likeness (NIL) rights while preserving the core educational and nonprofessional nature of college sports as a product. Currently the NCAA requires its athletes to maintain a very broadly defined amateur status to remain eligible for competition. The current amateurism definition states that athletes must forego …

Whatever Did Happen To The Antitrust Movement?, Herbert Hovenkamp

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article begins with a historical question about whatever happened to the antitrust movement. The short answer is that antitrust grew up. It ceased to be the stuff of political banners and loose rhetoric and turned into a serious discipline, applying defensible legal and empirical techniques to problems within its range of competence.

The way to repair deficiencies in antitrust law today is not to resort to an undisciplined set of goals that provide no guidance and could do serious harm to the economy. Rather, it is to make ongoing adjustments in our technical rules of antitrust enforcement which reflect …

“I’Ll Know It When I See It”: Defending The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’S Approach Of Interpreting The Scope Of Unfair, Deceptive, Or Abusive Acts Or Practices (“Udapp”) Through Enforcement Actions, Stephen J. Canzona

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

Constraining Monitors, Veronica Root

Journal Articles

Monitors oversee remediation efforts at dozens, if not hundreds, of institutions that are guilty of misconduct. The remediation efforts that the monitors of today engage in are, in many instances, quite similar to activities that were once subject to formal court oversight. But as the importance and power of monitors has increased, the court’s oversight of monitors and the agreements that most often result in monitorships has, at best, been severely diminished and, at worst, vanished altogether.

The lack of regulation governing monitors is well documented; yet, the academic literature on monitorships to date has largely taken the state of …

Criminal Trademark Enforcement And The Problem Of Inevitable Creep, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This Article, delivered as the 2017 Oldham Lecture at the University of Akron School of Law, focuses on the federal Trademark Counterfeiting Act (TCA), the primary source of federal criminal trademark sanctions. That statute was intended to increase the penalties associated with the most egregious form of trademark infringement — use of an identical mark for goods identical to those for which the mark is registered and in a context in which the use is likely to deceive consumers about the actual source of the counterfeiter’s goods. The TCA was intended to ratchet up the penalties associated with counterfeiting, but …

Product Hopping: A New Framework, Michael A. Carrier, Steve D. Shadowen

Notre Dame Law Review

One of the most misunderstood and anticompetitive business behaviors in today’s economy is “product hopping,” which occurs when a brand-name pharmaceutical company switches from one version of a drug to another. These switches, benign in appearance but not necessarily in effect, can significantly decrease consumer welfare, impairing competition from generic drugs to an extent that greatly exceeds any gains from the “improved” branded product.

The antitrust analysis of product hopping is nuanced. It implicates the intersection of antitrust law, patent law, the Hatch-Waxman Act, and state drug product selection laws. In fact, the behavior is even more complex because it …

Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?, Stephen Yelderman

Journal Articles

This Article is the first to seriously scrutinize the claim that patent challenges lead to increased competition. It identifies a number of conditions that must hold for a patent challenge to provide this particular benefit, and evaluates the reasonableness of assuming that the pro-competitive benefits of patent challenges are generally available. As it turns out, there are a number of ways these conditions can and regularly do fail. This Article synthesizes legal doctrine, recent empirical scholarship, and several novel case studies to identify categories of challenges in which the potential benefits for competition are smaller than previously thought or, in …

From The Great Depression To The Great Recession: On The Failure Of Regulation In The Mortgage Market, Dov Solomon

Journal of Legislation

People tend to attribute the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis to deregulation. This article challenges this view and presents a unique perspective of the crisis as in fact rooted in the way the residential mortgage market is regulated. Focusing on non-recourse mortgage legislation, which is a unique feature of the US mortgage market dating back to the period following the Great Depression, the article analyzes the contribution of this legislation to the onset of the Great Recession. The discussion shows how regulation that was enacted in response to a major economic crisis not only failed to prevent a large-scale …

Inside The Taft Court: Lessons From The Docket Books, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

For many years, the docket books kept by certain of the Taft Court Justices have been held by the Office of the Curator of the Supreme Court. Though the existence of these docket books had been brought to the attention of the scholarly community, access to them was highly restricted. In April of 2014, however, the Court adopted new guidelines designed to increase access to the docket books for researchers. This article offers a report and analysis based on a review of all of the Taft Court docket books held by the Office of the Curator, which are the only …

Call Me, Maybe? The Seventh Circuit's Call In Motorola Mobility, Jeffrey H. Smith

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note seeks to establish that the Seventh Circuit should have held in Motorola Mobility that the FTAIA’s “direct . . . effect” requirement is satisfied when a foreign subsidiary suffers a harm due to anticompetitive activity abroad and there exists a reasonably proximate causal nexus between that harm and the domestic effect in the United States. Furthermore, the “gives rise to” requirement of the FTAIA sufficiently accounts for concerns of international comity and, under the facts of this case, causes Motorola’s claim to fail. Part I explores the history of the Sherman Antitrust Act and its international application before …

Market Power Without Market Definition, Daniel A. Crane

Notre Dame Law Review

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 …

Analyzing The Scope Of Major League Baseball's Antitrust Exemption In Light Of San Jose V. Office Of The Commissioner Of Baseball, Justin B. Bryant

Notre Dame Law Review

San Jose's antitrust suit against Major League Baseball renews the challenge of defining the scope and applicability of the baseball antitrust exemption and the struggle to sort through the lower court precedent to arrive at a workable standard for the exemption. This Note will discuss the history of the exemption, the potential standards for applying the exemption, and analyze Judge Whyte's order dismissing San Jose's antitrust claims in City of San Jose v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball to determine the persuasiveness the court's opinion may have going forward as well as potential issues with the court's reasoning.