University of Pennsylvania Symposium on Post-Chicago Antitrust

The University of Pennsylvania Law Review has published its symposium issue on the Post-Chicago Antitrust Revolution.  The articles, available here, address a range of cutting-edge issues, but I will note two of them here that may be of particular interest to readers of this blog (and which I highly recommend):

1.  Herbert Hovenkamp & Fiona Scott Morton, Framing the Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis.  Here is the abstract:

The Chicago School of antitrust has benefitted from a great deal of law office history, written by admiring advocates rather than more dispassionate observers. This essay attempts a more neutral examination of the ideology, political impulses, and economics that produced the School and that account for its durability.

The origins of the Chicago School lie in a strong commitment to libertarianism and nonintervention. Economic models of perfect competition best suited these goals. The early strength of the Chicago School was that it provided simple, convincing answers to everything that was wrong with antitrust policy in the 1960s, when antitrust was characterized by over-enforcement, poor quality economics or none at all, and many internal contradictions.

The Chicago School’s greatest weakness is that it did not keep up. Its leading advocates either spurned or ignored important developments in economics that gave a better accounting of an economy that was increasingly characterized by significant product differentiation, rapid innovation, networking, and strategic behavior. The Chicago School’s protest that newer models of the economy lacked testability lost its credibility as industrial economics experienced an empirical renaissance, nearly all of it based on models of imperfect competition.

What kept Chicago alive was the financial support of firms and others who stood to profit from less intervention. Properly designed antitrust enforcement is a public good. Its beneficiaries—consumers—are individually small, numerous, scattered, and diverse. Those who stand to profit from nonintervention were fewer in number, individually much more powerful, and much more united in their message. As a result, the Chicago School went from being a model of enlightened economic policy to an economically outdated but nevertheless powerful tool of regulatory capture.

The article presents quite an indictment of some recent cases, including (albeit briefly) FTC v. Qualcomm. 

Before I move on to the next article, I should note that I also highly recommend Hovenkamp's recent article FRAND and Antitrust, 105 Cornell L. Rev. 1683 (2020), a draft of which I have cited in some of my work but, to my surprise, I haven't previously noted on this blog.  Here is the abstract:

This Article addresses one question: when is a Standard Setting Organization (SSO) participant’s violation of a FRAND commitment an antitrust violation, and if it is, of what kind and what are the implications for remedies? It warns against two extremes. One is thinking that any violation of a FRAND commitment is an antitrust violation as well. In the first instance FRAND obligations are contractual, and most breaches of contract do not violate any antitrust law. The other extreme is thinking that, because a FRAND violation is a breach of contract, it cannot also be an antitrust violation. The question of an antitrust violation does not depend on whether the conduct breached a particular agreement but rather on whether it caused competitive harm. This can happen because the conduct restrained trade under section 1 of the Sherman Act, was unreasonably exclusionary under section 2 of the Sherman Act, or amounted to an anticompetitive condition or understanding as defined by section 3 of the Clayton Act. The end goal is to identify practices that harm competition, thereby injuring consumers.

2. The other article from the Penn symposium, a draft of which I have previously noted on this blog, is Mark A. Lemley & Carl Shapiro, The Role of Antitrust in Preventing Patent Holdup.  Here is the abstract:

Patent holdup has proven one of the most controversial topics in innovation policy, in part because companies with a vested interest in denying its existence have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to debunk it. Notwithstanding a barrage of political and academic attacks, both the general theory of holdup and its practical application in patent law remain valid and pose significant concerns for patent policy. Patent and antitrust law have made significant strides in the past fifteen years in limiting the problem of patent holdup. But those advances are currently under threat from the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, which has reversed prior policies and broken with the Federal Trade Commission to downplay the significance of patent holdup while undermining private efforts to prevent it. Ironically, the effect of the Antitrust Division’s actions is to create a greater role for antitrust law in stopping patent holdup. We offer some suggestions for moving in the right direction.