Danny Sokol points to Spencer Webber Waller’s “The Chicago School Virus.”  Given the paper’s title, the fact that I’ve written previously on the irresponsible or misleading usages of the term Chicago School, and the author’s predilection to take shots at the Chicago School more generally (previous attempts include describing Hovenkamp’s recent movement toward Chicago School views as imposing the “thinking man’s death sentence” on the U.S. antitrust system), I was pleasantly surprised by the paper. The paper is really about why the Chicago School succeeded in some substantive fields of law and not others. It is quite careful to avoid cheap mischaracterizations of the intellectual content of the Chicago School, and much more importantly, Waller offer some interesting insights about why certain intellectual movements succeed and fail in different areas of law.

Read the full piece here.

The Searle Center at Northwestern University School of Law will be holding a conference on this subject starting a week from today on Thursday, November 15th.  I’m very much looking forward to participating.

Read the full piece here.

I’ve done some more thinking about my recent post on the problems associated with claims that infer greater antitrust enforcement quality solely from enforcement activity and come to the conclusion that my post oversimplified matters. I remain rather skeptical about this inference but wanted to highlight some of the nuances in the debate that I skimmed over in the previous post. In the spirit of highlighting some of these issues, and because I’ve always wanted to try one of these posts, here’s a hypothetical dialogue between myself (JW) and an anonymous economist with a more interventionist bent (AE) in the spirit of highlighting some of the complexities of the potential link between enforcement activity and consumer welfare…

Read the full piece here. 

The New York Times isn’t the only one calling for the FTC to go after Intel for its purportedly exclusionary discounting. The reliably interventionist American Antitrust Institute concurs. In a recent letter to the FTC, it wrote…

Read the full piece here. 

I just wandered down to the local Panera Bread for lunch and picked up someone’s discarded copy of today’s New York Times. One of today’s editorials, F.T.C. Goes AWOL, claims that the Federal Trade Commission “clearly shares the ‘starve the regulators and coddle industry’ philosophy that has driven the Bush administration for seven years.” The evidence? The FTC’s refusal to open a formal investigation into Intel’s loyalty discounts, which are offered to computer makers that minimize the use of processors made by Intel’s rivals.

Read the full piece here. 

From the Economic Times:

The European Union’s antitrust agency is becoming more influential just as its US counterparts have grown more cautious and inactive, experts say. The European Commission’s recent success in forcing Microsoft to carry out antitrust sanctions underscores the differences, and academic researchers say the US is also hanging back in merger challenges. That makes Brussels, more than Washington, the place where companies must go to get their deal through and where companies must ready themselves against possible antitrust action. It also means competition agencies around the world look to Brussels.

“Influential” v. “cautious” and “inactive.” I get it. The implication is that EU antitrust enforcement is good and US enforcement is bad. The proof? One is allegedly more interventionist than the other. As a general matter, I do not find “more is better” arguments (see, e.g., here) causally linking agency activity to the quality of antitrust policy to be very persuasive.

Read the full piece here.

Todd Zywicki recommends Kurt Eichenwald’s The Informant, the fascinating story of the prosecution of the Archer Daniels Midland lysine cartel in the 1990s, and asks whether the famous DOJ videotapes and transcripts of cartel meetings are available online.  I’m not sure if they are online, but the DOJ does make the tapes and transcripts available free of charge (or at least used to) by mailing or faxing a request to the following address…

Read the full piece here.

It looks like California consumers, unlike their counterparts in several other states, will be getting cash instead of coupons in their settlement against U.S. Tobacco in one of the many follow-on actions to Conwood Co. v. United States Tobacco.  The settlement looks to be in the range of $96 million with qualifying customers taking home anywhere between $195 and $585 depending on how many consumers are willing to sign a sworn statement that they purchased more than 30 cans of certain brands in the relevant time period.

Read the full piece here.

Today marked the completion of the J. Mirrlees Institute of Economic Policy Research (IEPR) Conference on China’s Competition Policy and Anti-Monopoly Law at Peking University in Beijing. I was thrilled to be invited to participate in the conference. A special thanks to Hongbin Cai of Peking University for the invitation, and for organizing an all around wonderful event.

Read the full piece here.