TOTM
Abandoning Antitrust Common Sense: The FTC’s New Normal?
Truth on the Market
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This symposium wonders what exactly is “The FTC’s New Normal”? The short answer: scary.
The current Federal Trade Commission (FTC) leadership is clear that old U.S. Supreme Court opinions, rather than more recent jurisprudence, are their lodestones for antitrust analysis. This is dramatically illustrated by the draft merger guidelines recently proposed by the FTC and U.S. Justice Department’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division; as Geoff Manne has noted, of the 48 antitrust decisions cited, only 10 are from this century, and on a weighted-average basis, the cases cited are almost a half-century old!