Modern antitrust law has come under intense criticism in recent years, with a bipartisan chorus of complaints about the power of technology and internet platforms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. A fundamental issue in these debates is how to define the “market” for the purposes of antitrust law. But market definition is highly contentious. The Supreme Court case that launched modern market definition has become the name of an economic blunder: the “Cellophane fallacy,” and the Justices in 2018’s Ohio v. American Express case disagreed with each other so strongly that the dissent described the majority’s approach as not only “wrong” but “economic nonsense.” Partially in response to the controversy in American Express, recent judicial, legislative, and regulatory proposals have even suggested doing away with market definition in some antitrust cases. The root problem, this Article shows, is that modern market definition has been treated in antitrust as a matter of quantitative economics, with markets defined by economic formulas (such as the Lerner Index) lacking a connection to widely held social understandings of competition. Antitrust law needs to augment these quantitative approaches by explicitly acknowledging qualitative aspects of markets, including the normative visions of competition they represent. When more fully considered, the Lerner Index itself represents a vision of competition, but it is a vision is one that no society would want to pursue. Paying attention to the normative meaning underlying quantitative measures is hardly radical; such qualitative factors have been part of market definition since its origin. The Cellophane fallacy itself was originally advanced not as a point about economics but about the content of the antitrust law. This Article argues that market definition is necessarily normative and describes an approach for including qualitative criteria in market definition so that market definition accurately reflects the types of competition antitrust law seeks to protect.
Academic and market interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has grown markedly in recent years. Although less prominent, a...
This essay considers the future of public-private collaboration in the wake of the Murthy v. Missouri litigation, which cast doubt on the...
Critics of initiatives to diversify corporate boards frequently rely on efficiency arguments. Diversity opponents marshal four principal claims. First...
The number of law firm partners who identify as women has more than doubled since 1993. Will these gender parity advances regress as employers curb...
This Essay expounds on the outsized role of private law in governing ownership of new technologies and data. As scholars lament gaps between law and...
As our nation emerges from the shadow of COVID-19, the general public is coming to grips with a stark reality looming over our public schools...
Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...
Privacy is a key issue in AI regulation, especially in a sensitive area such as healthcare. The United States (US) has taken a sectoral approach to...
In Cantero v. Bank of America, the US Supreme Court declined to decide whether Bank of America Corp. must pay interest on New York mortgage borrowers’...
The 2024 edition of Selected Intellectual Property, Internet, and Information Law, Statutes, Regulations, and Treaties, edited by Professors Sharon K...
Twenty-first-century politics has inspired a new mode of interstate rivalries and reprisals consisting not of the tariffs that plagued the Founding...
We live in an age of student surveillance. Once student surveillance just involved on-campus video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines...
Fifty years ago, federal and state lawmakers called for the regulation of a criminal justice “databank” connecting federal, state, and local agencies...
The use of autonomy to initiate force, which states may begin to view as necessary to protect against hypersonic attacks and other forms of ‘hyperwar...
Anyone who studies trade secret law in depth knows that the field is complex and nuanced. That complexity can be intimidating to novices. Accordingly...
Anyone who studies patent law in depth knows that the field is complex and nuanced. That complexity can be intimidating to novices. Accordingly, the...
There have been many many, many proposals to use Russia’s frozen assets to help Ukraine. Russia’s invasion violated international law; reparations are...
After several years of dramatic growth, ESG investing seems to have entered a period of retrenchment. While it is impossible to predict the future...