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New Civil Liberties Alliance – The International Center for Law & Economics was mentioned by the New Civil Liberties Alliance in a media release regarding Judge Lewis Liman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York citing the amicus brief filed jointly by ICLE and NCLA in moving to dismiss the Bystolic antitrust litigation. You can read full release here.

“The Court agrees with the argument in the amicus brief from the New Civil Liberties Alliance and the International Center for Law and Economics that the appropriate question is the “net” benefit conferred by the reverse payment and not its gross size vel non.”

In its amicus brief, NCLA argued that Congress has long mandated that courts should strive to maintain a balance between the sometimes-competing claims of the patent law and antitrust law, and that antitrust law should not be used to shortchange the rights of patent holders. NCLA’s successful amicus curiae brief was joined by the International Center for Law and Economics.

Reason – ICLE Scholars Brian Albrecht, Dirk Auer, Eric Fruits, and Geoffrey A. Manne were cited by Reason in an item about ICLE’s white paper on “doomsday mergers.” You can read full piece here.

A new paper from the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) looks at panicky predictions about past business mergers that haven’t panned out as the doomsayers warned. The paper comes as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice “prepare to release updated federal merger guidelines that the agencies say will better detect and prevent illegal and anticompetitive deals,” notes ICLE in a press release. But bureaucrats and politicians don’t have a great track record on predicting the effects of particular mergers, suggest Brian Albrecht, Dirk Auer, Eric Fruits, and Geoffrey A. Manne in “Doomsday Mergers: A Retrospective Study of False Alarms.”The authors point to alarms sounded over Amazon’s 2017 purchase of Whole Foods, Bayer’s 2018 merger with Monsanto, Google’s 2019 purchase of Fitbit, and Anheuser-Busch InBev’s 2016 acquisition of SABMiller. In the latter case, “critics claimed [the acquisition] would increase the price of beer and decimate the burgeoning craft-beer segment,” they write:

Instead, the concentration of the beer industry decreased after the mergers, prices did not increase on average, and the craft-beer segment thrived. This is not to say that all is rosy; the price of some beers did indeed increase after the wave of mergers. Regardless, it is clear the post-merger outcome was a far cry from the doomsday scenario that critics predicted.

People feared that Google’s purchase of Fitbit would lead to consumer privacy violations and make Google more dominant in advertising, because Google would use data from the devices in its advertising business. “The fear was that, by purchasing Fitbit, Google would be in a position to better target ads throughout its entire platform, thereby increasing its hold on the broader advertising industry,” note the authors. But:

Four years on, however, the opposite appears to have happened. From 2017 to 2022, Google’s share of online advertising spend has steadily declined, falling from 34.7% to 28.8%.118 And it is not just in relative terms; the company’s quarterly earnings reports show a clear decline in ad revenue, including year-over-year drops in the fourth quarter of 2022 of 8.6% for the Google network and 7.0% for YouTube. As usual, critics may retort that Google’s revenues and market shares would have declined even more absent the merger but, once again, that was not the initial claim. Instead, they wrote that the merger would give Google an unbreakable grip on the online-advertising industry—the “horse has bolted” as Gregory Crawford put it—and that has not been the case.

You can read the full report here. The authors conclude with a warning: “We should be skeptical of kneejerk projections of doom, whether from activists, competition scholars, or media pundits.”

Law360 – ICLE Director of Competition Policy Dirk Auer was quoted by Law360 in a story about ICLE’s white paper on “doomsday mergers.” You can read full piece here.

“When we hear critics saying this merger is going to be disastrous and antitrust is not up to the task, that just doesn’t pan out,” Auer told Law360 in an interview.

The paper puts ICLE in the middle of the policy debate between defenders of traditional merger review rooted in how deals will affect consumer prices and advocates of a more expansive and aggressive approach often described as neo-Brandeisians. In addressing the last two mergers, the paper also speaks to current enforcement actions.

Cayman Compass – ICLE Senior Scholar Julian Morris was quoted by the Cayman Compass in a story about the impact that the global minimum tax could have on business in the Cayman Islands. You can read full piece here.

Julian Morris, a Cayman Islands-based economist who was also a guest on Thursday’s panel discussion at the Kimpton Seafire Resort, suggested this would effectively defeat the object of the measure – which is intended to repatriate wealth to the US and European countries.

Morris suggested this reaction from competitor jurisdictions would play into Cayman’s hands.

“Cayman will remain a pure tax-neutral jurisdiction and therefore could become even more attractive as a domicile,” he suggested.

The Powell Tribune – ICLE Academic Affiliate George Mocsary was quoted by The Powell Tribune in a story about the University of Wyoming’s new firearms research center, of which he is co-founder. You can read full piece here.

For center co-founder and director George Mocsary, whose parents escaped communism in Eastern Europe, it’s all about freedom.

“My father was a political prisoner for 16 years for helping student leaders speak and for helping them escape from behind the Iron Curtain,” Mocsary said.

His father spent six of those years imprisoned in solitary confinement. His mother escaped from communist Hungary on Christmas Eve, making a run for it in the middle of the night through a minefield. They ended up in New York, where Mocsary was born. He has championed freedom for most of his life.

“Tyranny is a lot harder to perpetrate against an armed population,” he said in a Tuesday interview.

Yet, Mocsary didn’t set out to be a legal scholar. First he earned a degree in engineering; then an MBA. The juris doctorate didn’t come until later in his career, but it’s in the legal field that he’s become a nationally recognized expert. He’s now a UW law professor and the co-founder of the university’s new Firearms Research Center.

Mocsary’s work has been cited by Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, the Illinois Supreme Court, and other federal courts. He is frequently quoted about firearms law in newspapers and periodicals.

Bitcoinik – ICLE Academic Affiliate Thibault Schrepel was quoted by Bitcoinik in a story about what the EU Data Act will mean for decentralized finance. You can read full piece here.

Professor Thibault Schrepel of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam also shared his personal opinion on this new EU law and said that if it will happen then surely it will be tough for the Defi protocol users to understand who controls the platform.

Cryptopolitan – ICLE Academic Affiliate Thibault Schrepel was quoted by Cryptopolitan in a story about what the EU Data Act will mean for so-called “smart contracts.” You can read full piece here.

Professor Thibault Schrepel of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam expressed his concerns in a tweet about the Act, which he believes “endangers smart contracts to the extent that no one can predict.” Furthermore, he highlighted potential sources of legal uncertainty in the Act, particularly concerning who has the authority to stop or interrupt a smart contract.

Yahoo Life – ICLE Academic Affiliate Thibault Schrepel was quoted by Yahoo Life in a story about what the EU Data Act will mean for so-called “smart contracts.” You can read full piece here.

The relevant portion of the Data Act, Article 30, “endangers smart contracts that no one can predict” according to Thibault Schrepel, a blockchain law expert and co-director of the Amsterdam Law & Technology Institute at VU Amsterdam. In a March 14 tweet, he said that the immutability of smart contracts is key, adding:

That said, he noted that better defining the terms of the act would be an improvement, as its focus is on data sharing specifically.

Blockworks – ICLE Academic Affiliate Thibault Schrepel was quoted by Blockworks in a story about Article 30 of the EU Data Act. You can read full piece here.

Thibault Schrepel, an associate professor at the VU University Amsterdam, noted in a tweet that this new bill “endangers smart contracts to an extent that no one can predict.”

“Article 30 does not provide clarity as to who should be able to ‘terminate the continued execution of transactions,’” Schrepel tweeted. “Is it the creator of the smart contract? Public authorities? Courts?”