For decades, antitrust enforcers ignored employer power in labor markets, adopting neoclassical assumptions that labor markets are competitive. Despite fanfare regarding recent labor antitrust enforcement, enforcers still deploy neoclassical assumptions and methods, targeting only proven deviations from a presumed competitive baseline, or infracompetitive wages and working conditions. The New Labor Antitrust deduces harms only from reduced competition...
Compelled interoperability can be a useful judicial or statutory remedy for dominant firms, including digital platforms with significant market power in a product or service. They can address competition concerns without interfering unnecessarily with the structures that make digital platforms attractive and that have contributed so much to economic growth.
Given the wide variety of structures and business models for big tech, “interoperability”...
Nascent tech acquisitions have been the subject of renewed regulatory and antitrust scrutiny in recent years. These acquisitions can often be very small—hundreds of tech deals have occurred in the past decade below the current reporting threshold of $101 million—and the current merger review process of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) often fails to capture the harms unique to these early-stage deals. This Note argues that the FTC should...
Introduction In Apple Inc. v. Pepper, the Supreme Court held that consumers who allegedly paid too much for apps sold on Apple’s App Store because of an antitrust violation could sue Apple for damages because they were “direct purchasers.” The decision sidesteps most of the bizarre complexities that have resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1977 […]
Antitrust courts often confront “mixed” conduct that has two contrasting effects, one harmful and the other beneficial. For example, a nationwide agreement not to pay college football players harms the players while benefiting fans of amateur sports. An important tool for analyzing mixed conduct is to compare the action to a hypothesized alternative and to ask whether the alternative action is “less restrictive” and hence less harmful....
In antitrust law, the state action doctrine allows states to take regulatory actions that would otherwise result in violations of the federal antitrust laws. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has not always provided clear guidance in its state action jurisprudence, and lower courts have expressed frustration with this doctrinally confusing area of antitrust law. There is confusion among the lower courts over the relationship between state...
The legal campaign against the administrative state has a new front: general rulemaking provisions. General rulemaking provisions authorize agencies, in an open-ended way, to write rules to carry out Congress’s directives. Administrative agencies have relied on such provisions for decades. But over the last several years, some litigators, scholars, and judges have advanced limiting theories that would, if applied widely, greatly reduce the ability...
Antitrust scholars have virtually ignored the question of who controls corporations by sitting on their boards of directors. We show that the problem of who sits on boards of directors is considerably greater than previously believed. Drawing on a new dataset spanning both public and private companies across multiple industries, we find evidence that individual board members sit simultaneously on boards of competitors throughout the economy, despite...
Most states have laws prohibiting corporations from owning healthcare practices or employing physicians, collectively forming the corporate practice of medicine doctrine (CPOM). CPOM laws were designed to ensure that licensed professionals, not corporate laymen, decide patient treatment.
Large corporations and private equity firms routinely circumvent CPOM laws by creating subsidiary companies that ostensibly “manage” healthcare practices....
In spring 2023, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) resolved three of the four largest bank failures in U.S. history. When the FDIC resolves failed banks, this Note argues, it (unselfconsciously) allocates coordination rights—that is, the right to legally permitted economic coordination. Specifically, by reflexively merging failed banks into larger banks, the FDIC adopts antitrust law’s preference for hierarchical firm-based coordination....