Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the freshman Republican and Tea Party favorite, is only slightly more famous as the son of Representative Ron Paul than as the deliberate namesake of Ayn Rand. Last Thursday he introduced a genuine humdinger. Deploying that prowess for economic and legal analysis that may characterize many ophthalmologists, Senator Paul seems…
The next Term may see significant SCOTUS consideration of the state action immunity, the first such case since 1992. The decision below in the defendants’ favor was quite plainly wrong, and so it might also become only the second antitrust case in twenty years in which the Court has ruled for a plaintiff. That would…
In a recent letter to the House Transportation and Infrastructure leadership, all four sitting Federal Trade Commissioners joined in “grave concern” over that Committee’s plan to kick the agency out of the iconic, art deco building that FDR built for it nearly 75 years ago. The House Committee and its chairman intend to turn the…
Something striking occurred in the Seventh Circuit this year. In two different, massive antitrust class actions, in the space of about nine months, panels of that court applied the Twombly-Iqbal pleading formula to reach opposite conclusions, even though both cases involved very similar fact allegations and the same procedural posture. Both cases also involved the…
What really has the world come to when a merger to monopoly followed by a 1300% price increase survives Section 7 challenge? That, sadly, seems to be the final result in Federal Trade Commission v. Lundbeck, which the Eighth Circuit affirmed last Friday. There the maker of one drug to treat a heart defect in…
Some commentators are pretty alarmed over the Federal Trade Commission’s ruling earlier this year denying antitrust immunity for a North Carolina regulatory board’s outlawry of teeth-whitening by non-dentists. What has some of them using words like “epic,” and what has the state regulator-defendant virtually threatening secession from the Union (just take a look at the…
A decision to watch for this year is the Eighth Circuit’s pending consideration of FTC v. Lundbeck, Inc., 2010-2 Trade Cases ¶77,160; 2010 WL 3810015 (D. Minn. Aug. 31, 2010). (While I helped draft an amicus brief in that case, on behalf of the American Antitrust Institute, the views here are strictly my own.) If…
