Study

This course will explore, and bring together, several strands of reasoning in antitrust law and litigation: First, students will examine how antitrust law relies on broad principles whose formulation and maturation is developed inductively through common law techniques. Put more simply, antitrust doctrine is made through specific cases, i.e., the law comes litigation, it is not made by Congress or an agency promulgating regulations.  Second, students will appreciate antitrust law’s elasticity which balances broad principles being applied to different industries whose economics may be very different. Third, students will understand why some of the greatest lawyers in the last century—Louis Brandeis (a famous antitrust plaintiffs’ lawyer), David Boies, John Paul Stevens, Patrick Lynch, and others—were antitrust lawyers:  their abilities combined legal and factual rigor with creativity.  Students will explore these strands by discussing five “problems” in antitrust litigation:  (1) class certification (including the critical concepts of proving “classide” impact with “common” proof under Fed. R. Civ. P. 23(b)(3)); (2) making economic testimony understandable and persuasive; (3) antitrust in an era of standard essential patents (how do we apply antitrust principles to standard setting?); (4) the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act and Extraterritoriality; and (5) “Neo-Brandeisian”, a/k/a ‘hipster’ antitrust: Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple.