Asserting a breach-of-contract defense based on the illegality of the contact under the Robinson-Patman Act appears to be as difficult as successfully alleging a Robinson-Patman Act claim itself. Earlier this week, the federal district court in San Francisco refused to allow a manufacturer of premium pet food to nullify its agreement with a retailer on the ground…
Today, the Federal Trade Commission released a plan for dealing with a government shutdown that would occur if Congress fails to enact appropriations by a midnight deadline. A shutdown looked likely as budget talks appeared to have broken down early Friday morning. As part of the FTC’s plan, the Commission’s Premerger Notification Office would remain…
Microsoft Corporation has filed a formal complaint with the European Commission (EC) against Google Inc. as part of the EC’s ongoing antitrust investigation into the search engine company. In a March 30 blog post, Brad Smith, Microsoft Senior Vice President and General Counsel, said that the software company and search engine rival wanted to register…
It is traditional in beginning an article on antitrust law and intellectual property to note the tension―or, as some would put it, the conflict―when the two intersect. And there is certainly support in the earlier case law for that point of view. As the Second Circuit observed in SCM Corp. v. Xerox Corp., 645 F.2d…
Claims that E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company attempted to wield, and did wield, monopoly power over the U.S. para-aramid fiber market in violation of Sec. 2 of the Sherman Act should not have been dismissed, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, has decided. Kolon Industries, Inc., a small seller of para-aramid…
Including an arbitration agreement in a commercial or consumer contract that requires your customer to pursue only individual claims in the arbitral forum will not necessarily protect you from class-wide arbitration. You will need to ensure that individual arbitration will allow your customers to enforce their statutory rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals in New…
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…
Soon after Jon Leibowitz became the head of the Federal Trade Commission in March 2009, he told attendees of the American Bar Association’s Section of Antitrust Law Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C. that they could expect continuity in enforcement at the agency. Leibowitz’s recent nomination to serve another seven years at the Commission points to…
The FTC has suffered a setback in its challenge to Laboratory Corporation of America’s acquisition of Westcliff Medical Laboratories, Inc. The federal district court in Santa Ana, California, on February 22 denied the agency’s request for a preliminary injunction to prevent integration of the firms pending the outcome of an administrative trial challenging the transaction….
Information sharing between merging parties is a crucial part of pre-merger due diligence, yet courts have rarely weighed in to clarify when, if ever, such information exchanges run afoul of the antitrust laws. On January 10, 2011, a federal appeals court spoke for the first time on the topic. In Omnicare, Inc. v. UnitedHealth Group,…
