Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Speculative Tech: The Bitcoin Legal Quagmire & The Need For Legal Innovation, Paul H. Farmer Jr.

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Standard Essential Patents, Trolls, And The Smartphone Wars: Triangulating The End Game, 119 Penn St. L. Rev. 1 (2014), Daryl Lim

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Few legal issues in recent years have captured the public's attention more powerfully than litigation over standard essential patents (“SEPs”). This Article explains how SEP litigation overlaps with two other major centers of patent litigation--litigation involving smartphones and patent assertion entities (“PAEs”). It observes that attempting to pre-empt patent hold-ups by imposing blanket ex ante disclosure obligations and royalty caps on standard setting organizations (“SSOs”) is misdirected and counterproductive. Instead, the solution lies in clear and balanced rules to determine “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” (FRAND) royalties and injunctive relief. This solution will help parties make more realistic assessments of their …

The Transformation Of Vertical Restraints: Per Se Illegality, The Rule Of Reason, And Per Se Legality, D. Daniel Sokol

UF Law Faculty Publications

Robert Bork probably had the single most lasting influence on antitrust law and policy of anyone in the past 50 years. To read the 1978 Antitrust Paradox today, one is struck by how closely contemporary case law tracks Bork's policy prescriptions. The speed at which the transformation in law and policy occurred in antitrust is perhaps unprecedented across any area of common law. In the 1970s, antitrust jurisprudence and enforcement policies were in tension with industrial organization economics. Bork created a unified goal for antitrust based on a “consumer welfare prescription” to shape the development of the case law. The …

The Effect Of The Jobs Act On Underwriting Spreads, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

U.S. underwriting fees, or spreads, have somewhat inexplicably clustered around 7% for years, a phenomenon that some have suggested evidences implicit collusion. The goal of Title I the JOBS Act of 2012 was to make going public easier for smaller firms; certain provisions specifically should make the underwriters’ task less risky, and thus less expensive. Presuming these provisions are effective, then one would predict that underwriting spreads would decrease as the costs to the underwriter for a public offering declined. Admittedly the prior presumption is a big one: it may be that the JOBS Act reforms were largely ineffective, and …

Collusion To Control A Powerful Customer: Amazon, E-Books, And Antitrust Policy, John B. Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

A federal judge recently held that Apple violated antitrust law by conspiring with leading publishers to raise e-book prices. While the Justice Department characterized the case as routine, many commenters argued it should not have been brought. In their view, the real villain was Amazon, whose power and aggressive behavior threatened to create a monopoly, reduce consumer choice, and diminish the vitality of book publishing. In the face of such a powerful customer, the publishers should have been allowed to collude. This article addresses that issue, in the e-books case and in general. In the e-books case, collusion was almost …

The Reasonable Information Security Program, Peter Sloan

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Our information inhabits a perilous world. Cyber theft, cyber extortion, mobile device loss, misappropriation of confidential business information, and unauthorized disclosures of protected information are real and present dangers for organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

Delay And Its Benefits For Judicial Rulemaking Under Scientific Uncertainty, Rebecca Haw Allensworth

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court’s increasing use of science and social science in its decision-making has a rationalizing effect on law that helps ensure that a rule will have its desired effect. But resting doctrine on the shifting sands of scientific and social scientific opinion endangers legal stability. The Court must be be responsive, but not reactive, to new scientific findings and theories, a difficult balance for lay justices to strike. This Article argues that the Court uses delay — defined as refusing to make or change a rule in light of new scientific arguments at time one, and then making or …

A Restatement Of Health Care Law, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Kamakahi V. Asrm: The Egg Donor Price Fixing Litigation, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In April 2011, Lindsay Kamakahi caused an international stir by suing the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), SART-member fertility clinics, and a number of egg donor agencies on behalf of herself and other oocyte donors. The suit challenged the ASRM-SART oocyte donor compensation guidelines, which limit payments to egg donors to $5,000 ($10,000 under special circumstances), as an illegal price-fixing agreement in violation of United States antitrust laws.

Ensuing discussion of the case has touched on familiar debates surrounding coercion, commodification, and exploitation. It has also revealed many misconceptions about oocyte donation, …

Elhauge On Tying: Vindicated By History, Barak D. Richman, Steven W. Usselman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Robert Bork's Forgotten Role In The Transaction Cost Revolution, Alan J. Meese

Faculty Publications

The last few decades have witnessed a scientific revolution in the field of industrial organization in the form of transaction cost economics (TCE). This revolution has radically altered economists’ understanding and interpretation of both partial and complete economic integration. Not surprisingly, this sea change has substantially influenced antitrust law and policy, impelling the Supreme Court to reverse or greatly modify various precedents.

This essay supplements the received historiography of the TCE revolution. It contends that Robert Bork played a hitherto underappreciated role in that revolution. In particular, the essay contends that in 1966, before the official onset of the transaction …

Cars Activity Report 2007–2013, Agata Jurkowska-Gomułka

internetowy Kwartalnik Antymonopolowy i Regulacyjny (internet Quarterly on Antitrust and Regulation)

CARS Activity Report 2007–2013

Ridding The Law Of Outdated Statutory Exemptions To Antitrust Law: A Proposal For Reform, Anne Mcginnis

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Antitrust law is designed to be an overarching check against anticompetitive conduct that harms the free market system. Almost as soon as the first antitrust laws were enacted in the United States, however, industry groups began lobbying Congress for exemptions from these laws. Most of the statutory exemptions created over the last one hundred years remain in place, despite widespread changes in economic theory, market structures, and overall antitrust law. Today, some exemptions are merely irrelevant, while others actively harm society by transferring wealth to private individuals and hampering beneficial competition. This Note proposes a fourpart legislative solution to rid …

Channeling And Contending With Bill Kovacic, Jonathan Baker

Contributions to Books

This essay was written for a festschrift in honor of Professor William E. Kovacic. It discusses Prof. Kovacic’s work on the design of antitrust enforcement institutions, the interplay between the Chicago and Harvard schools in the transformation of antitrust that took place a generation ago, and the extent to which antitrust norms exhibit continuity over time. It will published in "William E. Kovacic - Liber Amicorum: An Antitrust Tribute - Vol. II," which is scheduled to be released in February 2014 by the Institute of Competition Law.

Understanding The Limits Of The Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvement Act Using Tort Law Principles As A Guide, Rene H. Dubois

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Is 'Financial Stability' -The Need For Some Common Language In International Financial Regulation, Hilary Allen

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Post-Crisis international financial regulation is animated by the buzzwords 'financial stability, " but surprisingly little attention has been paid to what these buzzwords actually mean. This Article argues that there are many-largely unexplored- disagreements regarding the meaning of 'financial stability, " and that this lack of consensus has the potential to cause a host of problems. Chief amongst these is that disagreement about the meaning of "financial stability" can thwart harmonized national implementation of international financial stability regulation. To draw attention to this largely-ignored definitional problem, and to start the process of addressing it, this Article proposes a working definition …

After Search Neutrality: Drawing A Line Between Promotion And Demotion, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Federal Trade Commission's (“FTC” or “the commission”) January 3, 2013 decision to close its longstanding investigation of Google1 brings to a close a flurry of discussion over the possibility that Google could become subject to a “search neutrality” principle in the United States. Although the Commission found against Google on several grounds, it rejected petitions from Google's critics to create a search neutrality principle as a matter of antitrust law. This essay briefly analyzes what remains of U.S. antitrust scrutiny of Internet search bias after the Google settlement. In particular, it suggests that a sensible line can be drawn …

Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …

The Influences Of Strategic Management On Antitrust Discourse, Hillary Greene, Dennis A. Yao

Faculty Articles and Papers

This article examines how antitrust law and policy can benefit from ideas developed in the academic strategy field. Because accurate assessment and prediction of the effects of firm conduct depend in part on understanding individual firm capabilities, knowledge from the strategy field and other business fields complements the contributions from industrial organization economics (10). These business fields also offer theoretical and empirical challenges to the 10 paradigm, which dominates antitrust analysis. The article begins with a comparison between strategy and 10 and then illustrates how the strategy field can contribute to antitrust merger analysis. The article then assesses the influence …

The Tempting Of Antitrust: Robert Bork And The Goals Of Antitrust Policy, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Of all Robert Bork’s many important contributions to antitrust law, none was more significant than his identification of economic efficiency, disguised as consumer welfare, as the sole normative objective of U.S. antitrust law. The Supreme Court relied primarily on Bork’s argument that Congress intended the Sherman Act to advance consumer welfare in making its landmark statement in Reiter v. Sonotone that “Congress designed the Sherman Act as a ‘consumer welfare prescription.’” This singular normative vision proved foundational to the reorientation of antitrust law away from an interventionist, populist, Brandeisian, and vaguely Jeffersonian conception of antitrust law as a constraint on …