Corporate & Securities Law

David Balto (and the FTC) gets it woefully wrong on Intel

Posted on April 14, 2010
David Balto has penned a short apologia of the FTC’s Intel case (HT: Danny Sokol).  Unfortunately his defense (and, unfortunately, the FTC’s case) is woefully misguided. Balto writes: Intel has been clearly dominant in the market for central processing units (CPUs) with between 80 percent and 98 percent of the market...

Getting The Cart Before The Horse Exposes the Horse’s Rear

Posted on April 14, 2010
Will someone remind me just why the USDA and DOJ are hosting their little Antitrust in Ag roadshow this year? The Associated Press reports today that the USDA is set to release a new set of regulations on the livestock and poultry industries. Reporter Christopher Leonard describes the new regulations as “the most sweeping antitrust rules covering the meat industry in decades, potentially altering the balance of power between meat companies and the farmers who raise their animals...

Clerkships in Delaware for Aspiring Corporate Lawyers

Posted on April 12, 2010
Students interested in pursuing a career in corporate law often confront me about clerking in the Delaware Courts.  If you’ve taken basic Business Law in law school, you know that the Delaware Supreme Court and the Delaware Court of Chancery are the source of American corporate law, owing to the fact that corporate law is state based and most corporations are formed in Delaware...

Elena Kagan Email on the Solomon Amendment

Posted on April 12, 2010
A story in the WSJ Today describes how Elena Kagan is likely to face opposition based on her stance against the Solomon amendment, a law which denied schools federal funding if they failed to allow military recruiters on campus.  Dean Kagan, along with a number of other law school deans, challenged the law in Court and lost...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

TOTM Descends on Minnesota

Posted on April 11, 2010
Several TOTM bloggers will be at the Minnesota Conservative and Libertarian Legal Colloquim this Friday at the University of Minnesota Law School.  JW Verret and I will definitely be there, and word on the street is that co-blogger Todd Henderson might also make an appearance...

Klick on Libertarian Paternalism: The Dangers of Letting Someone Else Decide

Posted on April 10, 2010
Jonathan Klick (Penn) is next up in the Cato Unbound forum on libertarian paternalism featuring entries from Glen Whitman and Richard Thaler (and one from Shane Frederick coming).  My initial reaction to Thaler’s response to Whitman was that it was far too dismissive, defensive, and a bit out of tone for my own liking, but completely ignored what I take to be the core issue of the public/private distinction...

Blaming the D.C. Circuit for Regulatory Failure?

Posted on April 09, 2010
Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein offers a novel explanation for “regulatory failure.”  The D.C. Circuit, has, Pearlstein asserts, “has intimidated, undermined and demoralized the regulatory apparatus” by giving insufficient deference to regulators and “opinions that routinely ignore the plain language of statute and the clear intent of Congress...

DOJ Stumbling Out Of The Gate On Antitrust In Ag

Posted on April 09, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, J.P. Stadtmueller, U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, gave the green light for DOJ’s antitrust case against Dean Foods to move forward. Dean had filed a motion to dismiss based on its assertion that the DOJ had failed to provide sufficient evidence to support the DOJ’s antitrust claim and had failed to provide a sufficiently specific definition of the relevant market in which the anti-competitive effects were alleged to exist...

The New Paternalism at Cato Unbound

Posted on April 07, 2010
The excellent lead essay is from Glen Whitman, with responses planned from Richard Thaler, Jonathan Klick and Shane Frederick.  It should be a very interesting exchange.  Here is, in my view, one of Whitman’s best paragraphs: Nevertheless, Sunstein and Thaler (in Nudge) respond to the slippery-slope argument by saying we should ?make progress on those [initial proposals], and do whatever it takes to pour sand on the slope...

Assessing the claims that the Google-AdMob merger will “leverage Google’s dominance” and also kill kittens

Posted on April 07, 2010
News items continue to pile up suggesting that the FTC is likely to challenge Google’s acquisition of mobile application and website advertising provider, AdMob.  See this recent article from the Wall Street Journal.  News reports today contain this quote from an anonymous source: “The staff (at the U...

“The Chicago School of Economics, which is essentially what you learned in Economics 101 back in college”

Posted on April 06, 2010
That is the latest salvo from Commissioner Rosch in discussing Judge Easterbrook’s opinion in Jones v. Harris.   I cant decide whether this strikes me as more offensive to the Chicago School of antitrust economics or to Judge Easterbrook.  Probably the latter...

IP Colloquium: The First Sale Doctrine

Posted on April 04, 2010
For TOTM readers who might not know already, Professor Doug Lichtman (UCLA) has put together a great series of programs over at IP Colloquium. The IP Colloquium is an online audio program focused on patent and copyright issues where Professor Lichtman interviews guests from academia, business, and the judiciary to discuss current topics (archives available here)...

The Economics of Celebrity Endorsements

Posted on April 04, 2010
Bob Greene (CNN) argues that celebrity endorsements are meaningless.  Worse than that, according to Greene, celebrity endorsements necessarily amount to a raw deal for consumers: This is all elementary. If someone accepts cash in exchange for offering a positive evaluation of something, then the evaluation must be tossed out...

Antitrust Exam Question: Do the Major Institutional Investors Have an Antitrust Problem?

Posted on March 30, 2010
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that major institutional investors — CalPERS, CalSTRS, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, etc. — have collectively adopted a set of recommended practices that is “rankling” private equity firms...

“So when you listen to economists, you’re listening to amateurs”

Posted on March 29, 2010
So says David Zaring over at the Conglomerate — at least when it comes to the topic of regulation.  I don’t buy it.   Anyway, here’s the complete quote for context: Economists love to suggest new regulatory structures (or, more often, why they will not work)...

“Like A Rain Dance That Produces No Clouds”

Posted on March 27, 2010
My colleague Tom Hazlett, along with George Bittlingmayer and Arthur Havenner, provides some economic wisdom on why they don’t call it stimulus anymore: Counter to the predictions put forward a year ago by the Administration, when it claimed that “more than 90 percent of the jobs created are likely to be in the private sector,” U...

The Market Responds

Posted on March 25, 2010
The final vote hasn’t even been taken to “fix” the omnibus (or ominous) health care “reform” legislation that President Obama signed into law this week, and already the first volley of the market’s response has been sounded...

The Case Against the Antitrust Case Against Google

Posted on March 24, 2010
We have just uploaded to SSRN a draft of our article assessing the economics and the law of the antitrust case directed at the core of Google’s business:  Its search and search advertising platform.  The article is Google and the Limits of Antitrust: The Case Against the Antitrust Case Against Google...

A proposed amendment to our Constitution

Posted on March 24, 2010
Ask any conservative what the problem with America is today, and the answer you will get is government spending. But ask that same conservative, or any conservative for that matter, what to do about it, and the shoulders will inevitably shrug. Politicians, including conservatives, simply cannot be trusted when they get control of the purse strings...

Maybe We’ll Get Us a Calorie Czar!

Posted on March 24, 2010
Yesterday, Todd predicted that Obamacare will result in greater government involvement in heretofore private decisions that impact health. Since the government is now going to pay (via insurance subsidies) for many more Americans’ health care, it has a much stronger interest in how they live...

Varney’s comments from the DOJ/USDA hearings [#dojusda #agworkshop]

Posted on March 23, 2010
The DOJ has posted the transcript from the recent DOJ/USDA hearings on antitrust in agriculture here.  I figured our readers might be especially interested in seeing Christine Varney’s comments (especially without having to slog through all 350 pages to find them!)...

The dark side of altruism

Posted on March 23, 2010
Have you ever been tempted to buy a beggar a cup of coffee or a sandwich instead of giving money? If so, you have, like a young Anakin Skywalker, taken your first step to the dark side of altruism. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been there too. The reason I offered food instead of (money for) vodka is because I wanted to “help” the beggar...

Politically-Mandated Credit Card Interchange Fees Won?t Create Jobs (But They Will Hurt Consumers and the Economy)

Posted on March 21, 2010
by Geoffrey A. Manne, Joshua D. Wright and Todd J. Zywicki (soon to be cross-posted at Business in the Beltway (at Forbes.com) and The Volokh Conspiracy) In a recent commentary at Forbes.com, former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro argues that some 250,000 jobs would be created, and consumers would save $27 billion annually, by reducing the interchange fee charged to merchants for transactions made by consumers using credit and debit cards...

Don’t Like the Texas Board of Education’s Brainwashing? There’s a Simple Solution.

Posted on March 21, 2010
Lots of liberals, such as Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank and folks from the Huffington Post and People for the American’s Way’s Right Wing Watch, are all up in arms over the Texas Board of Education’s recent efforts to push Texas’s public school curriculum in a decidedly “conservative” direction...

Paul M. Bator award

Posted on March 20, 2010
I loath the Oscars, Golden Globes, and other award shows. Is there anything worse than a bunch of self-important blowhards congratulating themselves and blathering about how they are what makes the world a place worth living? Well, perhaps, a bunch of conservative students and law professors doing the same thing might be worse...

Breaking Antitrust News: Imposing Duty to Promote Rivals Helps Rivals

Posted on March 19, 2010
From the AP: Norway’s Opera said Thursday that downloads of its browser more than doubled after Microsoft Corp. was forced to give European users a choice of Web software to settle European Union antitrust charges.  Microsoft started sending updates to Windows computers in Europe in early March that launches a pop-up screen telling them to pick one or more of 12 free Web browsers to download and install, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer...

Leegin Legislation Update

Posted on March 19, 2010
A Senate panel approved the Leegin Bill on a voice vote (HT: Main Justice).  The story behind the link suggests that there is some Republican opposition brewing.  I suspect there will be hearings.  The Bill’s findings make the following two observations: (3) Many economic studies showed that the rule against resale price maintenance led to lower prices and promoted consumer welfare, and; (4) abandoning the rule against resale price maintenance will likely lead to higher prices paid by consumers and substantially harms the ability of discount retail stores to compete...

Coke, Pepsi, Product Promotion and the Efficiencies of Vertical Integration

Posted on March 17, 2010
The soda industry is trending toward vertical integration, which Coke and Pepsi acquiring their largest bottlers.  From the WSJ: Coke and PepsiCo sell concentrate to bottlers, which then bottle and distribute the soft drinks in their territories. Many of these smaller bottlers are small businesses that have been run by family members for decades and have perpetual contracts to distribute the sodas...

An Honest Question for Obamacare Supporters

Posted on March 16, 2010
A number of opponents of Obamacare, such as Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn, have criticized the President and his people for referring to pending proposals as “health insurance reform” rather than “health care reform.” I suppose these critics think the President is engaging in a sleight of hand in an effort to minimize the significance of the reform proposals — as in, “We’re not reforming the whole health care system, just health insurance...

Are Friedman, Marx, Smith and Keynes Really Out of Hayek’s League?

Posted on March 16, 2010
Justin Wolfers is one of my favorite economics bloggers in large part because of the empirical, evidence-based approach he takes to economics problems and policy issues.  As co-blogger Todd points out, Wolfers recently generated some data (JSTOR citation counts) that he argues supports the assertion that Hayek is out-classed by those mentioned in the title to this post...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.