Corporate & Securities Law

DOJ To Announce More Agressive Antitrust Enforcement [Updated]

By David Fischer

Today’s New York Times has a front page article about a speech that new DOJ Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Christine Varney will give today (and again tomorrow).  The speech is not (yet) on the DOJ webpage and the article only provides a general sense of what will be in the speech:

[DOJ] plans to restore an aggressive enforcement policy against corporations that use their market dominance to elbow out competitors or to keep them from gaining market share. … Ms. Varney is expected to say that the administration rejects the impulse to go easy on antitrust enforcement during weak economic times. She will assert instead that severe recessions can provide dangerous incentives for large and dominating companies to engage in predatory behavior that harms consumers and weakens competition. The announcement is aimed at making sure that no court or party to a lawsuit can cite the Bush administration policy as the government?s official view in any pending cases. In the speeches, Ms. Varney is expected to explicitly warn judges and litigants in antitrust lawsuits not involving the government to ignore the Bush administration?s policies, which were formally outlined in a report by the Justice Department last year. The report applied legal standards that made it difficult to bring new cases involving monopoly and predatory practices.

“The report” referenced in the article is presumably the Section 2 report issued by DOJ last fall.

Update: DOJ has issued a press release announcing the formal withdrawal of the Section 2 report:

Christine A. Varney, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department’s Antitrust Division, today announced that the Department is withdrawing, effective immediately, a report relating to monopolization offenses under the antitrust laws that was issued in September 2008. As of today, the Section 2 report will no longer be Department of Justice policy. Consumers, businesses, courts and antitrust practitioners should not rely on it as Department of Justice antitrust enforcement policy.

Update 2: Both of her speechs are now up (one, two).

Full post as published by Antitrust Review on May 11, 2009 (boomark / email).