Skip to content
LPE Originals

Is Anyone Afraid of Breaking The Price-Fixing Laws Anymore?

By

The DOJ’s price-fixing suit against RealPage, which has uncovered brazen collusion among competing landlords across the United States, is a welcome departure from decades of hands-off antitrust enforcement. Yet with prices going up in industry after industry, and so few price-fixing cases brought in recent years, it appears many businesses have determined that the risk of collusion is worth the reward.
LPE Originals

From the Vault: LPE on Antitrust

By

To kick off a new series – From the Vault – we dip into the archive and highlight some of our favorite posts on antitrust. Featuring classics by Sanjukta Paul, Sandeep Vaheesan, Marshall Steinbaum, Brian Callaci, and John Mark Newman.
LPE Originals

(Some of) The Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

By

With the spring submission season nearly in the books, we highlight some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering antitrust, legal theory, climate change, religion, disability, labor, consumer protection, criminal law, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
LPE Originals

The Limits of Anti-Monopsony Antitrust

By

The Biden administration’s antitrust policy has been the most pro-labor in decades. And yet, the response from labor advocates and the labor movement has been rather muted. Why the disconnect? And what can it teach us about the limits of antitrust policy that takes the ideal of perfect competition as its normative benchmark?
LPE Originals

How Not to Regulate Digital Platforms

By

In Paul Gowder’s recent blog post, as well as in his new book, he argues that we should democratize, rather than dismantle or restructure, Big Tech platforms. However, this familiar framing obscures more than it reveals, relying upon an impoverished account of the political economy of technology, of the co-evolution of politics and production, and of the core role of material infrastructure in digital settings.
LPE Originals

The Treatise That Has Misled Antitrust Lawyers for Decades

By ,

Stephen Breyer called it more valuable than circuit court precedents and Supreme Court Justices. Yet the Areeda-Hovenkamp treatise on antitrust law adopts misleading legal interpretations that systematically favor corporate power in at least two key areas: thresholds for exclusive-dealing foreclosure and the efficiencies defense for mergers. Time for a reappraisal of an antitrust staple.
LPE Originals

Dismantle or Democratize Big Tech?

By

With bipartisan calls to break up big tech, it is worth pausing to ask whether the proposed remedy matches the diagnosis of the problem. Antitrust breakups work best when there’s a clear conflict between public and company interests. Yet with some of the most pressing problems – such as the spread of disinformation – company and public interests plausibly converge. An alternative approach would be to keep tech companies intact but integrate users and workers more directly into their governance systems.
LPE Originals

Brandeis in Brussels: What American Reformers Can Learn from the European Union

By ,

Neo-Brandeisian and other legal scholars generally associate Brandeis with America’s own anti-monopoly traditions. Yet Brandeis himself drew inspiration from developments unfolding across the Atlantic, and in contrast to Postwar America, where many of his institutional insights were eventually abandoned, the European competition regime has gradually gravitated toward an increasingly Brandeisian approach.
LPE Originals

The Merger of Government and Religion

By ,

An alliance between religious and economic conservatives is playing a central yet overlooked role in the resurgence of concentrated economic power in America, resulting in the transfer of public funds, services, and decision-making away from more democratic institutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of “government-religious hospitals”: these hospitals are state owned, yet religion permeates their halls, and faith dictates the care they offer. To mitigate the risk that these arrangements pose, we must make innovative use of LPE’s tools, including antitrust, public utility regulation, and public options.
LPE Originals

The Economics of Reaction

By

The economic style of thinking has undeniably constrained progressive ambitions. Yet this framing overlooks a secondary role that the economic style plays in political life: it provides cover for explicitly conservative and reactionary arguments by cloaking them in seemingly apolitical, technical expertise.
LPE Originals

When It Comes to the History of Economics, Don’t Think like an Economist

By

In charting economists’ pernicious influence on public policy, Beth Popp Berman contrasts an “economic style,” which focuses on efficiency, choice, and competition, with an alternative approach that favors equality, stability, and democratic participation. But that framing is not faithful to the actual debates that took place, out of which the economic style achieved its dominance, because it gives no account of the alternative economic views and theories that were displaced.