By Robert E. Connolly [1] and Masayuki Atsumi [2] The fugitive disentitlement doctrine is an equitable doctrine under which a court has the discretion to decline to consider a petition of a defendant if that defendant does not appear before the court. “The paradigmatic object of the doctrine is the convicted criminal who flees while…
Earlier this year, Libratus – an artificial intelligence system developed by Carnegie Mellon University – conquered four of the world’s top professional poker players in a Head’s-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em tournament (one of the most complicated forms of poker). [1] This might not sound all that surprising to those recalling Gary Kasparov’s defeat at the…
The Federal Trade Commission’s new Economic Liberty Task Force, launched by FTC Acting Chairman Maureen Ohlhausen, is an important step that addresses concerns from this blogger and others that the FTC’s commissioners should do more to head off the competitive restraints imposed by certain state licensing requirements. The move is consistent with recent efforts by…
What light does the European Commission’s much anticipated 130-page decision, published Monday, 19 December 2016, shed on the Commission’s case and the parties’ prospects for appeal? In the second of a series of short blogs on the Apple case, here’s a quick-look review and comment on the Commission’s decision. We know now that the Commission’s…
On January 25, 2017, the Trump administration designated Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen as Acting Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Because Ohlhausen has been a Commissioner since 2012 (and held other FTC positions before that), she certainly left plenty of tea leaves for antitrust practitioners to read as they tried to guess how she would act…
George Mason Law Review will hold its 20th Annual Antitrust Symposium on February 23, 2017, at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School in Arlington, Virginia. The topic of the conference is “Twenty Years in Antitrust and Lessons for a New Administration.” After an introduction and welcome by Henry N. Butler, Dean at the law…
Last July, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division filed two actions, challenging proposed mergers that would have reduced the country’s “big five” health insurers to three. Bench trials have been held in these matters. On Monday, Judge John Bates of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. preliminary enjoined Aetna Inc.’s $37 billion attempt to…
Introduction On a number of occasions the Court of Justice (CJEU) has been tasked with deciding how familiar concepts of competition law apply to novel facts. In Eturas (Case C-74/14, judgment of 21 January 2016), questions of how concerted practices should be considered in the online world were referred to the CJEU for a preliminary…
As 2016 comes to a close, a number of important trends in antitrust have emerged that will likely have lasting effects on competition law enforcement in the coming years. A new administration will put its mark on federal antitrust policy, but the following five developments witnessed at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and FTC…
There has been a lot of speculation about what impact the election of Donald J. Trump will have on antitrust enforcement over the next four to eight years. Some commenters have suggested that Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail signals dramatic changes. Candidate Trump spoke of blocking AT&T Inc.’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Inc….
