Here you go–Commercial Roundup for the couple of weeks ending September 14, 2023
Commercial Roundup – September 15, 2023
Commercial Roundup – August 23, 2023
This late-summer edition of Commercial Roundup features a notable ruling on personal jurisdiction, a pair of False Claims Act decisions, a couple of opinions tossing class certification orders, a 2-1 split in a securities fraud case (the dissent has the better end of it), a rare victory for plaintiffs in an action for unlawful maintenance
Big Boost in Antitrust Funding Won’t Happen in 2023
As I mentioned last month in Antitrust Enforcers Must Have More Funding, the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission need a boost of $340 million from current funding just to return them (in constant dollars) to 1979
Commercial Roundup – July 26, 2023
Welcome to the Commercial Roundup for July 26, 2023. With the U.S Supreme Court and the highest courts of New York and Texas on hiatus, the Supreme Court of Delaware and nine of the 13 U.S. Courts of Appeals supplied the commercial decisions that Roundup has cut into little pieces for you to sample.
- Antitrust
Why the District Court Didn’t Stop Microsoft from Buying a Top Spot in a Consolidating Video-Game Market
Two writers who cover antitrust issues asked me to comment on a Northern District of California judge’s July 11th ruling that the Federal Trade Commission hadn’t met its burden of proving grounds for a preliminary injunction against Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard. The deal promised to catapult Microsoft into second place in
Commercial Roundup – July 13, 2023
Welcome to The Commercial Roundup for July 13, 2023. While the pace of new opinions has slowed, it has not stopped. And this issue includes the end of the Supreme Court’s 2022-23 Term.
Antitrust enforcers must have more funding
Robert Bork said that serving on the U.S. Supreme Court “would be an intellectual feast”.[1]
Abstract, arcane, and avid for tricky math, the technocratic approach Bork advocated in The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself has all but devoured the faintly-beating populist heart of antitrust law.
As a result, Paradox has for the 45 years since its 1978 debut made antitrust enforcement actions increasingly costly to bring, far harder to win, and challenging for even competition experts to understand.
In an economy that has grown 1,000 percent since 1978, suffers from far greater concentration of markets, and brims with ever more gigantic firms, antitrust agencies need more resources (in terms of today’s dollars) than they did then.
Yet they have less. That must change.[2]
Paying More in the “But-For World” as Injury to “Property”
Last month, the American Antitrust Institute and three economists moved to file amicus briefs in favor of an economic model that quantifies what Google describes as “happiness”. AAI and the economists seek to support opinion evidence in antitrust litigation against Google, In re Google Play Store Antitrust Litig., No. 3:21-md-02981-JD (N.D. Cal.), pending before
Commercial Roundup – June 14, 2023
Antitrust Lessons for Patent Cases
A golden age of civil antitrust, from the 1960s into the 1980s, enriched the victims of cartels and monopolies but upset corporate America. The high cost of paying treble damages claims eventually provoked a spare-no-expense approach to defense. That in turn influenced the way plaintiffs prosecuted their Sherman Act claims.
Much the same thing has