Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Of Contract, Culture, And The Code: Judge Easterbrook And The Cheyenne Indians, John M. Conley

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Common Sense And Contract Law: Fear Of A Normative Planet?, Thomas Joo

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Helping Yourself While Serving Two Masters: Do Specialists Violate Rule 10b-5 When They Interposition?, Roman Asudulayev

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The decision of the Second Circuit in United States v. Finnerty (Finnerty III) was the culmination of a number of District Court decisions that found that specialists on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) could not be held liable for fraud under Rule 10b-5 for interpositioning, whereby they put themselves between buy and sell limit orders, in violation of NYSE rules, and profited on the spread. Finnerty III and its District Court sibling decisions were wrongly decided. Specialists presented a uniquely thorny issue of agency law to the Federal Courts in New York. This issue was under-analyzed by the Federal …

Quality Collusion: News, If It Ain’T Broke, Why Fix It?, Mark Mcmillan

Fordham Urban Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Rems-Restricted Drug Distribution Programs And The Antitrust Economics Of Refusals To Deal With Potential General Competitors, Henry N. Butler

Florida Law Review

This Article provides an antitrust and economic analysis of a refusal-to-deal claim in the REMS context. The analysis suggests that the antitrust claims involved do not provide a proper justification for a new exception to a competitor’s right to refuse to deal. The FDA and Congress play important roles in the complex regulatory scheme of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. With so much regulation and oversight, antitrust has little place in ensuring an efficiently functioning market for REMS-restricted pharmaceuticals.

Part I provides background about generic drug entry under the Hatch-Waxman Act, which lays out the framework for ANDAs, and discusses REMS-restricted …

Antitrust Limits On Targeted Patent Aggregation, Alan Devlin

Florida Law Review

Patent-assertion entities (PAEs) are non-technology-practicing companies that aggregate and license patents under threat of suit. Their activities have drawn fire, including presidential condemnation, and spurred proposed legislation to protect operating firms against them. PAEs leverage flaws in the patent system to extort firms that independently invent and sell technological goods to consumers. Since PAEs tax innovators and appear to restrict rather than facilitate wealth transfer to original patentees, their worst rent-seeking practices almost certainly reduce net incentives to innovate and harm consumers. This result is more likely if the principal desirable incentive that PAEs create is to file patents rather …

Do Automated Trading Systems Dream Of Manipulating The Price Of Futures Contracts? Policing Markets For Improper Trading Practices By Algorithmic Robots, Gregory Scopino

Florida Law Review

This Article seeks to determine if the CFTC needs new tools to combat disruptive, manipulative, or otherwise harmful trading practices that originate solely from the “minds” of ATSs. Part I of this Article provides a brief regulatory background of the derivatives markets, then examines the increased automation in those markets today, and concludes by looking at the CFTC’s initial responses to the issues raised by automation. Part II briefly looks at the law concerning different mental states for causes of action. Part III examines the CFTC’s pre and post-Dodd–Frank Act tools to police disruptive and manipulative trading practices, which are …

Why A "Large And Unjustified" Payment Threshold Is Not Consistent With Actavis, Michael A. Carrier

Washington Law Review

This Article offers three reasons why a requirement that a plaintiff demonstrate a large and unjustified payment before reaching the rule of reason is not consistent with Actavis. First, nearly all of the Court’s discussion of large and unjustified payments occurred in contexts unrelated to the antitrust analysis that future courts were to apply. Second, the Court instructed lower courts to apply the rule of reason, not a new framework with a threshold it never mentioned. And third, such a threshold is inconsistent with the Court’s (1) allowance of shortcuts for plaintiffs to show anticompetitive effects and market power …

Navigating Through The Fog Of Vertical Merger Law: A Guide To Counselling Hospital-Physician Consolidation Under The Clayton Act, Thomas L. Greaney, Douglas Ross

Washington Law Review

Lawyers assessing legality under the antitrust laws of hospital acquisitions of physician practices face a quandary. The case law is sparse, federal enforcement guidance outdated, and academic input conflicting. Applying these muddled standards in the rapidlyevolving health care sector only magnifies the uncertainty. While most transactions will be competitively neutral or beneficial, rapidly evolving market conditions causing integration between hospitals and physicians present opportunities for consolidations that may harm consumer interests. Indeed, given the highly concentrated structure of many hospital markets in the nation, preemptive acquisitions of physician practices may be a tempting strategy for some to undermine competition. This …

Why A "Large And Unjustified" Payment Threshold Is Not Consistent With Actavis, Michael A. Carrier

Washington Law Review

This Article offers three reasons why a requirement that a plaintiff demonstrate a large and unjustified payment before reaching the rule of reason is not consistent with Actavis. First, nearly all of the Court’s discussion of large and unjustified payments occurred in contexts unrelated to the antitrust analysis that future courts were to apply. Second, the Court instructed lower courts to apply the rule of reason, not a new framework with a threshold it never mentioned. And third, such a threshold is inconsistent with the Court’s (1) allowance of shortcuts for plaintiffs to show anticompetitive effects and market power …

Hospital Mergers And Economic Efficiency, Roger D. Blair, Christine Piette Durrance, D. Daniel Sokol

UF Law Faculty Publications

Consolidation via merger both from hospital-to-hospital mergers and from hospital acquisitions of physician groups is changing the competitive landscape of the provision of health care delivery in the United States. This Article undertakes a legal and economic examination of a recent Ninth Circuit case examining the hospital acquisition of a physician group. This Article explores the Saint Alphonsus Medical Center-Nampa Inc. v. St. Luke’s Health System, Ltd. (St. Luke’s) decision—proposing a type of analysis that the district court and Ninth Circuit should have undertaken and that we hope future courts undertake when analyzing mergers in the …

Book Review-Antitrust Guide For International Operations, Joseph P. Griffin

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Markovits On Defining Monopolization: A Comment, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

In this comment I focus on Richard Markovits’s definition of monopolization in his new book, Economics and the Interpretation and Application of U.S. and E.U. Antitrust Law (Springer 2014), and also his assertion that monopolization is distributively unjust. I agree wholeheartedly with his approach to defining monopolization, though I might alter a few details. However, I think the distributive justice effects of monopolization are ambiguous.

Understanding And Regulating Twenty-First Century Payment Systems: The Ripple Case Study, Marcel T. Rosner, Andrew Kang

Michigan Law Review

Ripple is an open-source Internet software that enables users to conduct payments across national boundaries in multiple currencies as seamlessly as sending an email. This decentralized Internet payment protocol could provide a cure to an inefficient cross-border payments system. Although Ripple’s technology can reduce significant risks and costs that exist in the internationalpayments system, regulators should adopt a new regulatory framework that responds to how this technology works. This Note performs two functions to help regulators realize this goal. It first helps regulators and other market participants understand how Ripple operates by explaining what Ripple is and comparing it to …

Dueling Monologues On The Public Domain: What Digital Copyright Can Learn From Antitrust, Timothy K. Armstrong

The University of Cincinnati Intellectual Property and Computer Law Journal

This article, written for the inaugural volume of the University of Cincinnati Intellectual Property and Computer Law Journal, explores the disconnect between contemporary United States intellectual property law and the often quite different consensus views of disinterested expert opinion. Questions concerning how copyright law treats the public domain (that is, uncopyrighted material) supply a lens for comparing the law as it stands with the law as scholars have suggested it should be. The ultimate goal is to understand why a quarter century of predominantly critical scholarship on intellectual property seems to have exerted such limited influence on Congress and …

Second-Generation Monopolization: Parallel Exclusion In Derivatives Markets, Felix B. Chang

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The reluctance of antitrust to condemn parallel exclusion permits oligopolies to be entrenched. This is because parallel exclusion—multiple-firm conduct that inhibits market entrants—cannot satisfy the current strictures of monopolization, which is understood to prohibit single-firm conduct. Yet this is an outdated way of conceptualizing monopolization. An expansion of monopolization—to cover parallel, non-collusive acts by an oligopoly—is due.

To push the law toward recognizing parallel exclusion, this Article examines concentration in the markets for financial derivatives, which are perennially dominated by the same big banks. Even after losses under first-generation antitrust claims, the dominant derivatives dealers have found ways to retain …

Student-Athletes Vs. Ncaa: Preserving Amateurism In College Sports Amidst The Fight For Player Compensation, Audrey C. Sheetz

Brooklyn Law Review

While student-athletes are the backbone of the $11 billion college sports industry, they do not currently receive any of this revenue derived from the use of their names, images, and likenesses. The National College Athletic Association’s mission is to maintain the amateur status of student-athletes. In doing so, it precludes student-athletes from receiving any type of compensation outside of the actual cost of tuition. Amateurism, as a concept, promotes the distinction between professional and student athletes, and is the crux of the NCAA’s argument for prohibiting the compensation of student-athletes. Recently, however, the controversy surrounding the amateur status of college …

Public Antitrust Enforcement Of Resale Price Maintenance In China: A Crusade Or Discrimination?, Jingmeng Cai

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

In recent years, a growing number of international observers and companies have expressed concerns that China may be using its new antitrust laws to discriminate against multinational companies. China’s antitrust decisionmakers, however, have taken pains to deny such criticisms. This article focuses on Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) to argue that these concerns are not always based in reality. After examining almost all of the decisions made public regarding RPM by the Chinese antitrust agency, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), this article analyzes the following three factors that have shaped how the NDRC enforces antitrust laws in China. First, …

Stosowanie Kar Pieniężnych W Unijnym I Polskim Prawie Konkurencji W Świetle Wymogów Ochrony Praw Człowieka, Adam Doniec

Monografie CARS/CARS Monographs

Przedmiotem pracy jest prawna analiza norm regulujących stosowanie kar pieniężnych w unijnych i polskich postępowaniach z zakresu ochrony konkurencji pod kątem przestrzegania standardów ochrony praw człowieka. Podstawowy cel tej pracy stanowi odpowiedź na pytanie, czy w polskim i unijnym systemie stosowania kar pieniężnych za naruszenie prawa konkurencji respektowane są wymogi ochrony praw człowieka. Żeby odpowiedzieć na to pytanie autor przedstawia znaczenie i zakres wybranych praw człowieka, a następnie wskazuje (po krótkiej analizie norm regulujących stosowanie kar pieniężnych przez organy ochrony konkurencji), które elementy systemu stosowania kar pieniężnych w unijnym i polskim prawie konkurencji mogą potencjalnie zagrażać wybranym prawom. Analiza ta …

The Commensurability Myth In Antitrust, Rebecca H. Allensworth

Vanderbilt Law Review

Modern antitrust law pursues a seemingly unitary goal: competition. In fact, competition-whether defined as a process or as a set of outcomes associated with competitive markets-is multifaceted. What are offered in antitrust cases as procompetitive and anticompetitive effects are typically qualitatively different, and trading them off is as much an exercise in judgment as mathematics. But despite the inevitability of value judgments in antitrust cases, courts have perpetuated a commensurability myth, claiming to evaluate "net" competitive effect as if the pros and cons of a restraint of trade are in the same unit of measure. The myth is attractive to …