We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having...

We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having...

This article, written for the Eighth Annual Legal Scholarship Symposium celebrating the work of Richard A. Epstein, assesses Epstein’s advocacy of a default rule for patent conveyances. The article first explains how nineteenth-century patent doctrine supports Epstein’s argument for a...

Innovation plays a crucial role in defining competitive dynamics. Given this fact, one might expect ‘innovation’ to play a consistent role in antitrust law. The present article conducts a systematic content analysis of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union to test this...

We analyze the effects of the 1984 breakup of the Bell System on the rate, diversity, and direction of US innovation. In the antitrust case leading to the breakup, AT&T, the holding company of the Bell System, was accused of using exclusionary practices against competitors. The breakup was...

This paper looks at whether the standard unilateral effects model can be applied to non-price competition parameters such as innovation. This question arises because competition authorities are intervening in horizontal mergers that are found to give rise to a “significant impediment to...

In my testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, I explained the benefits of legislation addressing anticompetitive conduct that brand-name drug companies have employed: sample denials, pay-for-delay settlements, citizen petitions, product hopping, and patent thickets. By increasing generic...

This paper discusses the effects of horizontal mergers on innovation. We rely on the existing academic literature and our own research work to present the various positive and negative effects of mergers on innovation. Our analysis shows that the overall impact of a merger on innovation may be...

Innovation can either be viewed by the competition authorities as a parameter that should be protected from the potential negative effects of a transaction, or it can be utilized by the merging parties as part of a defense argument to set off against or abate the anticompetitive concerns raised...