The seven-year legal battle between merchants that accept credit cards, on one side, and Visa, MasterCard, and the largest card-issuing banks, on the other, has entered a settlement phase. Unlike settlements in standard law suits where the parties can freely agree to any terms they choose, in a...

Professor Christina Bohannan's IP Misuse as Foreclosure enlightens the debate over the patent misuse doctrine's role in regulating intellectual property owners' ever-expanding claims. Presently, courts scrutinize licensing restrictions under the antitrust laws only after determining that the IP...

This article re-examines the historical, economic, and legal analyses of credit card interchange fees, rejecting the standard assumptions that (1) collectively set interchange fees are unlikely to harm consumers and (2) these fees cannot feasibly be set in a competitive fashion. Through a new...

Adam Levitin's article, quot;Priceless?: The Economic Costs of Credit Card Merchant Restraints,quot; 55 UCLA L. Rev. 1321 (2008), argues that credit card systems violate the U.S. antitrust laws by prohibiting merchants from surcharging credit card transactions and refusing to accept high-priced...

The Visa and MasterCard credit card networks require the banks (known as acquiring banks) to pay a portion of all purchases made with a credit card to the bank that issued the card. This fee, known as the interchange fee, is ultimately passed on by the acquiring bank to the merchants that accept...