Academic

Desautels-Stein on the Pragmatist Style & International Antitrust

By Lawrence Solum

Justin Desautels-Stein (University of Colorado Law School) has posted Extraterritoriality, Antitrust, and the Pragmatist Style (Emory International Law Review, Vol. 22, p. 499, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

In the last decades of the 20th century, David Kennedy and Martti Koskenniemi made the case that the modern structure of international legal argument was characterized by ?pragmatism.? Taking this idea as its baseline, this Article?s central argument is that legal pragmatism embodies a dominant style of contemporary legal reasoning, and that as Kennedy and Koskenniemi might have suggested, it is on display in some of the canonical antitrust decisions having an international dimension. The Article also seeks to show that pragmatism?s ostensible triumph is best understood as a contest of three distinctly legal pragmatisms: ?eclectic pragmatism,? as evidenced in the work of Thomas Grey and Daniel Farber, ?economic pragmatism,? as espoused by Richard Posner, and ?experimental pragmatism,? represented in the work of Charles Sabel, William Simon, and Michael Dorf. While these three styles are hardly determinative, they do suggest meaningfully different orientations, as illustrated in an analysis of F. Hoffman LaRoche Ltd. v. Empagran, the U.S. Supreme Court?s most recent extraterritorial antitrust decision. The irony, once one sees the three pragmatisms in action, is that they all fail to offer anything resembling the promise of a truly pragmatist moment of legal decision.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 15, 2009 (boomark / email).