Danny Sokol points to Professor Einer Elhauge’s (Harvard) forthcoming paper in Competition Policy International where he argues that recent Supreme Court antitrust jurisprudence reflects a choice in favor of the Harvard School rather than the Chicago School of antitrust analysis. I recommend Professor Elhauge’s analysis to our readers for at least two reasons.

Read the full piece here.

At his new blog Management R&D, Luke Froeb writes about the strategy of downstream firms reducing capacity in order to increase competition among suppliers…

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Thom’s excellent post covers most of the important points in Leegin and offers a fairly comprehensive critique of what I deemed to be a surprisingly weak dissent from Justice Breyer. As we’ve noted over and over here at TOTM, the death of Dr. Miles is clearly the right outcome judged based upon the underlying antitrust fundamentals. As Thom and I have pointed out in various posts on RPM here at TOTM, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that anticompetitive RPM is much talked about but rarely observed or documented. Given that the bulk of the contemporary evidence on RPM suggests that it is largely pro-competitive, I must admit that I was surprised by Tyler Cowen’s “casual guess” in a post at the VC that >50% of RPM are associated with attempts to collude.

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Professor Sokol points to this paper by Ittai Paldor (an SJD student at U. Toronto) which Sokol points out qualifies as the rarely observed defense of the per se rule against RPM.

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There’s just so much paper going back and forth on Leegin that it’s hard to keep up.

In addition to various briefs and commentaries and Commissioner Harbour’s de facto brief (also discussed here), there has been some interesting correspondence between Rep. Conyers, Chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and Deborah Platt Majoras, Chair of the FTC.

Read the full piece here. 

So it looks like Dr. Miles is going down. That’s a good thing.

For non-antitrusters, Dr. Miles is a 1911 Supreme Court decision holding that “minimum vertical resale price maintenance” is per se illegal — that is, automatically illegal without inquiry into the practice’s actual effect on competition. Minimum vertical resale price maintenance (or “RPM”) occurs when a manufacturer requires dealers who sell its product to charge no less than a set price for that product. For example, Ford might require its dealers to charge at least $30,000 for an Explorer.

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The AEI and Brookings have released a volume entitled “Antitrust Policy and Vertical Restraints.”  You can check out the contents here, and it is available for purchase here.

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Matt Bodie’s “Canons” project continues over at Prawfs, and antitrust is up to bat.  I took a stab at a reading list which I believe meet’s Matt’s criteria: articles that are essential to doing antitrust scholarship.  My long, but embarrassingly underinclusive list, is below the fold.  In particular, I have left out a good deal of more technical economics scholarship (though some appears on the list): the literature on merger simulation, post-Chicago models on specific vertical practices, nothing on immunities or exemptions, federalism, etc.

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I am heading to Harvard tomorrow for a conference, hosted by the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, on the value of case studies and the role of lawyers in deal making. Vic at the Glom has blogged about the conference here. The conference is organized around Vic Fleischer’s case study on the MasterCard IPO, and David Millstone & Guhan Subramanian’s study of the Oracle/Peoplesoft takeover bid

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