Justice Thomas’ opinion is available here.

Read the full piece here.

There is some antitrust buzz in the air after Steve Job’s “Thoughts on Music,” which discussed the possibility of eliminating DRM entirely. The real antitrust story, I suspect, is whether the rather transparent attempt to shift the gaze of regulators fixated on the iPod/iTunes combo to the big four’s “refusal” to go DRM-free will have any success. Antitrust Review has covered these issues at length, and Randy Picker chimes in as well. So does Frank Pasquale , who applauds the Norwegian antitrust attack on Apple and suggests that Apple adopt a “true interoperability” approach which “would likely lead to a boom in the sale of both digital music players and music.”

Read the full piece here. 

Representative Kucinich has announced that the House Oversight and Government Reform Domestic Policy Subcommittee will be launching an investigation into “a variety of marketplace issues including monopolies in the grocery industry.” HT: AntitrustProf Blog. Hearings are apparently tentatively scheduled for mid-month. What is the committee looking for? Just about anything.

Read the full piece here.

Securities fraud class-actions are down. In an op-ed in yesterday’s WSJ, Joseph Grundfest observed that both the number of such actions and the dollar value of total damages claims have dropped dramatically since mid-2005. Why has this decline occurred? Grundfest considers several possible reasons.

Read the full piece here. 

The tentative recommendations of the Antitrust Modernization Committee are out, and include Commissioner vote counts for various propositions. The recommendations largely take the form of propositions that the AMC Commissioners joined, did not join, or were undetermined. Here are a few that caught my eye on an initial read-through (note that 2-5 apply to merger analysis).

Read the full piece here. 

The FTC announced this week perhaps its best decision since . . . well, ever.

Read the full piece here.

Shubha Ghosh, of the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog, is predicting that the Supreme Court will not overrule the 1911 Dr. Miles decision, which holds that “vertical minimum resale price maintenance” (i.e., a manufacturer’s imposition of minimum resale price for his goods) is per se illegal.

Read the full piece here.

One of the more interesting parts of the November 29 DOJ/FTC hearing on loyalty discounts (where I presented these remarks) was the panelists’ discussion of a number of “propositions” advanced, for purposes of discussion only, by the agencies. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to discuss all the propositions. I’ve reproduced them below the fold, along with my own thoughts on whether they’re sound. (Please note the agencies’ insistence that “[t]hese propositions are solely for the purpose of discussion and do not necessarily represent the agencies’ views.”)

Read the full piece here.

Huh? This statement appears in this article by Professor Anthony D’Amato (Northwestern) on the failure of interdisciplinary scholarship in the legal academy. HT: Brian Leiter. Quite frankly, I was very surprised to see a claim like this in a paper written after 1970 or so. Even in corners of the academy hostile to economic analysis, antitrust is conventionally distinguished as a special case where economics is useful, typically along with some statement about the uniqueness of antitrust. D’Amato reserves no such special treatment for antitrust, criticizing that field in the context of a more general critique of what he describes as the “interdisciplinary turn” in the legal academy on three grounds…

Read the full piece here.