So, the only real surprise about yesterday’s opinion in North Carolina State Bd of Dental Examiners v. FTC is that it wasn’t unanimous. The strongly worded six-member majority opinion, already receiving early applause (see here and here), is further proof that the only thing the current Supreme Court dislikes more than antitrust plaintiffs is state…
Attention antitrusters! I’m pleased to pass along news of interest to all lawyers and economists active in antitrust litigation: The American Antitrust Institute has instituted a new award program to recognize those each year who have made the most significant contributions in antitrust enforcement. While I don’t speak for the group, I expect the goal…
It’s going to be a strict, nearly-per-se quick look rule, folks, in more or less every reverse-payment case likely to be brought from here on out. Dollars-to-donuts. A few weeks have gone by, and quite a lot of folks are chewing over the entrails of Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. The case may finally…
I often feel a certain deflation after the Supreme Court decides an antitrust case. After watching a case for months, prognosticating about it with other antitrusters, reading umpteen blog posts, reading the briefs if you’re into it and even some amici briefs if you’re really into it, the Court then rules one way or the…
Keep an eye out for the Court’s decision on certiorari in McCray v. Fidelity Nat’l Ins. Co., 682 F.3d 229 (3rd Cir. 2012). I have my fingers crossed that it may be the case in which the Court finally does the right thing with the accursed “filed rate doctrine.” I filed a brief in support…
On Friday morning the FTC announced that it had closed its investigation of Universal Music Group’s acquisition of EMI’s recorded music division. The Commission will not seek any concessions or take other action. Elsewhere I’ve written and said that I think the merger is probably awfully anticompetitive and that it should be blocked completely. A few thoughts….
During this past couple of years, my friend and colleague Barak Richman of the Duke law school has made a small cottage industry of pissing off organized Judaism. Himself newly the president of a synagogue in North Carolina, he turned his frustrating experience in hiring a new rabbi into a study of the antitrust treatment…
Well, okay, I guess there might just possibly have been an appellate decision this week of even more pressing moment, but I believe something important and very positive happened in the Seventh Circuit yesterday: the en banc reversal in Minn-Chem, Inc. v. Agrium, Inc., No. 10-1712 (7th Cir. June 27, 2012) (en banc) (“Potash II”)….
This morning the Court granted certiorari in Federal Trade Commission v. Phoebe Putney Health, No. 11-1160, on appeal from an execrable pair of opinions in the Eleventh Circuit and the Middle District of Georgia. At issue is a local hospital merger that would give the acquiror 100% in its county and upwards of 90% in…
Ah, the Spring Meeting. God I love it. Admittedly, the ABA Antitrust Section Spring Meeting, perhaps the profession’s preeminent event, is in some respects getting to be just a bit of a circus. What were once a handful of calm, early evening cocktail receptions in the bowels of the Marriott have grown into a deafening…
