The United States and the European Union operate the world’s two most powerful systems of competition law and policy, whose enforcement and judicial institutions employ similar concepts and legal language. Yet the two regimes sometimes reach very different results on significant antitrust issues. In The Atlantic Divide in Antitrust, Daniel Gifford and Robert Kudrle show that a combination of differences in social values, political institutions, and legal precedent inhibit close convergence. The book explores the main contested areas of contemporary antitrust: mergers, price discrimination, predatory pricing, exclusive supply, conditional rebating, intellectual property, and Schumpeterian competition. The authors explore how the prevailing antitrust analyses differ in the EU and the U.S., the policy ramifications of these differences, and how the analyses used by the enforcement authorities or the courts in each of these several areas relate to each other. Several themes run through the substantive areas treated in the book: pricing incentives and constraints, welfare effects, and whether competition tends to be viewed as an efficiency generating process or as rivalry. The notorious Microsoft case offers a useful lens to examine copyright, patents, and trade secrets, and the authors take the opportunity to contemplate competition policy in dynamic, innovative industries more broadly. For the EU, competition policy has also functioned as a mechanism to bond national markets together in the EU structure; the USA, federal from the beginning, did not require this instrumental aspect in its antitrust doctrines. The Atlantic Divide concludes with forecasts and suggestions about how greater compatibility, if not convergence, might ultimately be attained.

How is it that two broadly similar systems of competition law have reached different results across a number of significant antitrust issues? While the United States and the European Union share a commitment to maintaining competition in the marketplace and employ similar concepts and legal language in making antitrust decisions, differences in social values, political institutions, and legal precedent have inhibited close convergence. With The Atlantic Divide in Antitrust, Daniel J. Gifford and Robert T. Kudrle explore many of the main contested areas of contemporary antitrust, including mergers, price discrimination, predatory pricing, and intellectual property. After identifying how prevailing analyses differ across these areas, they then examine the policy ramifications. Several themes run throughout the book, including differences in the amount of discretion firms have in dealing with purchasers, the weight given to the welfare of various market participants, and whether competition tends to be viewed as an efficiency-generating process or as rivalry. The authors conclude with forecasts and suggestions for how greater compatibility might ultimately be attained.

In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system. A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic? The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.

This volume brings together leading articles on the regulation of joint conduct under competition law on both sides of the Atlantic. The articles discuss the general theoretical framework that has influenced the evolution of the law and policy; cover the most relevant practical developments; provide contrasting doctrinal views and pay particular at

How the Chicago School Overshot the Mark is about the rise and recent fall of American antitrust. It is a collection of 15 essays, almost all expressing a deep concern that conservative economic analysis is leading judges and enforcement officials toward an approach that will ultimately harm consumer welfare. For the past 40 years or so, U.S. antitrust has been dominated intellectually by an unusually conservative style of economic analysis. Its advocates, often referred to as "The Chicago School," argue that the free market (better than any unelected band of regulators) can do a better job of achieving efficiency and encouraging innovation than intrusive regulation. The cutting edge of Chicago School doctrine originated in academia and was popularized in books by brilliant and innovative law professors like Robert Bork and Richard Posner. Oddly, a response to that kind of conservative doctrine may be put together through collections of scores of articles but until now cannot be found in any one book. This collection of essays is designed in part to remedy that situation. The chapters in this book were written by academics, former law enforcers, private sector defense lawyers, Republicans and Democrats, representatives of the left, right and center. Virtually all agree that antitrust enforcement today is better as a result of conservative analysis, but virtually all also agree that there have been examples of extreme interpretations and misinterpretations of conservative economic theory that have led American antitrust in the wrong direction. The problem is not with conservative economic analysis but with those portions of that analysis that have "overshot the mark" producing an enforcement approach that is exceptionally generous to the private sector. If the scores of practices that traditionally have been regarded as anticompetitive are ignored, or not subjected to vigorous enforcement, prices will be higher, quality of products lower, and innovation diminished. In the end consumers will pay.

Language shapes and reflects how we think about the world. It engages and intrigues us. Our everyday use of language is quite effortless—we are all experts on our native tongues. Despite this, issues of language and meaning have long flummoxed the judges on whom we depend for the interpretation of our most fundamental legal texts. Should a judge feel confident in defining common words in the texts without the aid of a linguist? How is the meaning communicated by the text determined? Should the communicative meaning of texts be decisive, or at least influential? To fully engage and probe these questions of interpretation, this volume draws upon a variety of experts from several fields, who collectively examine the interpretation of legal texts. In The Nature of Legal Interpretation, the contributors argue that the meaning of language is crucial to the interpretation of legal texts, such as statutes, constitutions, and contracts. Accordingly, expert analysis of language from linguists, philosophers, and legal scholars should influence how courts interpret legal texts. Offering insightful new interdisciplinary perspectives on originalism and legal interpretation, these essays put forth a significant and provocative discussion of how best to characterize the nature of language in legal texts.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • When did America give up on fairness? The author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change—and charts a way back to the future. “Essential, absorbing . . . a graceful, authoritative guide . . . a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change.”—The New York Times Book Review During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope. Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself. Only a writer with Andersen’s crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen’s vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made disaster.

In recent years, market definition has come under attack as an analytical tool of competition law. Scholars have increasingly questioned its usefulness and feasibility. That criticism comes into sharper relief in dynamic, innovation-driven markets, which do not correspond to the static markets on which the concept of the relevant market was modelled. This book explores that controversy from a comparative legal perspective, taking into account both EU competition and US antitrust law. It examines the manifold ways in which courts and competition authorities in the EU and US have factored innovation-related considerations into market delineation, covering: innovative product markets, product differentiation, future markets, issues going beyond market definition proper – such as innovation competition, innovation markets and potential competition –, intellectual property rights, innovative aftermarkets and multi-sided platforms. This book finds that going forward, the role of market definition in dynamic contexts needs to focus on its function of market characterisation rather than on the assessment of market power.

Abusive Practices in Competition Law tackles the difficult questions presented to competition lawyers and economists regarding abusive practices: where and when is the red line crossed in competitive advances? When is a company explicitly dominant? How do you handle those who hold superior bargaining power over others but are not classed as dominant?

Research and real-life examples that “lucidly connect some of the divisive social issues confronting us today to that thing we call ‘the law’” (Law and Politics Book Review). Law and society is a rapidly growing field that turns the conventional view of law as mythical abstraction on its head. Kitty Calavita brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law is found not only in statutes and courtrooms but in our institutions and interactions, while inviting readers into conversations that introduce the field’s dominant themes and most lively disagreements. Deftly interweaving scholarship with familiar examples, Calavita shows how scholars in the discipline are collectively engaged in a subversive exposé of law’s public mythology. While surveying prominent issues and distinctive approaches to both law as it is written and actual legal practices, as well as the law’s potential as a tool for social change, this volume provides a view of law that is more real but just as compelling as its mythic counterpart. With this second edition of Invitation to Law and Society, Calavita brings up to date what is arguably the leading introduction to this exciting, evolving field of inquiry and adds a new chapter on the growing law and cultural studies movement. “Entertaining and conversational.” —Law and Social Inquiry