Antitrust remedies -- criminal and civil, public and private, penalties and injunctions -- are supposed to “eliminate the effects of the illegal conduct” and “restore competition.” In pursuing these goals, courts and enforcers are guided by the standard of economic efficiency and by...

The Department of Justice's Section 2 Report considered in great detail how courts should best go about identifying exclusionary conduct and how they should best remedy that kind of conduct once they found it. Even though the new Assistant Attorney General has now withdrawn the Report as an...

In this article, first published in 17 Managerial & Decision Econ. 127 (1996), we show how economic theory guides the courts' determinations of which harms from collusive and exclusionary practices constitute antitrust injury

This article, published in 1991, describes the two great ideologies of the market and the state that shaped antitrust law at its inception. In the evolutionary vision, market outcomes are spontaneous and unintended results of countless interactions of self-interested individuals; the resulting...

This article, published in 1981, examines the two-part Midcal Aluminum standard for state action antitrust immunity. Under that standard, private actors are immune from antitrust liability if (1) they act pursuant to a regulatory policy that is clearly articulated by the state as sovereign and...

In cases that allege price fixing or other per se violations of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, courts usually begin their opinions by saying there is no direct evidence of agreement—evidence like a “recorded phone call” that is “explicit and requires no inferences to establish” that the...

After the Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, an antitrust plaintiff who tries to plead an agreement in restraint of trade under Section 1 of the Sherman Act must allege more than parallel conduct and an undefined “conspiracy.” Now, the complaint must include...

Frank Easterbrook's 1984 article, The Limits of Antitrust, did not focus on public antitrust enforcement. Nevertheless, it expressed the kind of antitrust thinking that led the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, around the same time, to shift its resources to cartel...

Communication is useful and often necessary for rivals to coordinate price and output decisions. All would agree that evidence of communication on these issues is relevant to the issue of whether firms reached an illegal agreement or engaged in concerted action in violation of Section 1 of the...