Plastic payment cards are one of the great innovations of the twentieth century. Like the microchip, the personal computer, and the cellular telephone, payment cards have become ubiquitous after only a few decades of use, transforming the way business is conducted. Yet, payment card companies...

Professor Wright mischaracterizes both the legal basis and the factual context of the FTC's Three Tenors opinion, recently affirmed by Judge Ginsburg's opinion for a unanimous panel of United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Neither opinion's legal analysis relies on...

In 1979, the Supreme Court began departing from strict rule of reason/per se categorization and by 1999 the Court made clear that the rule of reason was a continuum. With the Court providing little guidance on the details of the conduct for which truncated analysis is warranted, the FTC has...

Since 1981, the FTC has attacked fraud systematically, successfully using the authority under Section 13(b) to obtain a permanent injunction “in proper cases” to freeze assets ex parte and to force disgorgement of ill-gotten gains. More recently, the Commission has asserted the authority to...

The antitrust agencies typically find customer reactions probative of the likely competitive effects of a merger. Thus, merger challenge data released by the FTC reveal that strong complaints from customers almost always lead to a government challenge. Nevertheless, some judges have been quite...

In 2018, a large group of former antitrust enforcers and scholars wrote to the Assistant Attorney General (AAG) in charge of the Antitrust Division about the Division’s sharp departure from the long-standing, bipartisan consensus regarding standard essential patents and commitments to license...

In 1981, while in the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, two of the authors were instrumental in initiating the FTC's fraud program, relying on Section 13(b)'s authority to obtain a permanent injunction to seek equitable relief, including asset freezes and consumer redress. The fraud program...

We clarify and defend the Chicago School of antitrust against incorrect and uninformed claims that it represents a narrow set of inefficiency impossibility theorems based on free market ideology. The Chicago School arose decades ago as a reaction to the then current antitrust policies. Chicago...