This paper contains an economic and legal analysis of the lawsuit Microsoft vs. U.S. Department of Justice beginning with the District Court’s decision on June 7, 2000 up to the Proposed Final Judgement on November 6, 2001. I found that the courts’ underlying economic paradigm regarding the...

China, like a number of other antitrust jurisdictions, has a law concerning unfair pricing. This article develops an economic framework for applying the unfair pricing law in China. The framework draws on the experience of courts and competition authorities in other jurisdictions and the...

Innovations typically rely on multiple inventions which, in turn, frequently are subject to multiple patents or patent applications. In such cases, fragmentation of patent ownership introduces obstacles that may significantly hinder innovation. Patent pools constitute one potential mechanism to...

The conventional legal analysis of technical standard setting derives primarily from antitrust law. But antitrust remedies, taken alone, may not be broad enough to address recent abuses of the standardization process. The principal example of this shortcoming is the well-known case of Rambus,...

Collective rights organizations (CROs) are patent pools, copyright collectives and cross-licensing arrangements that coordinate the licensing of intellectual property rights. CROs can have efficiency benefits by reducing transaction costs, eliminating royalty stacking and resolving conflicting...

If any court is linked to the “law and economics” movement, it is the Seventh Circuit, home of former Judge Richard Posner, the “Chicago School,” and analysis based on markets and economics. It thus comes as a surprise that in college-athletics cases, the court has replaced economic...

In the second direct challenge to the NCAA's amateurism rules, the Northern District of California court rejected an attempt by the NCAA and 11 conferences to dismiss claims that defendants violated antitrust law by “conspiring to impose an artificial ceiling on the scholarships and benefits...

Antitrust law has long been mindful of the danger that firms may misuse their patents to facilitate price fixing. Courts and commentators addressing this danger have assumed that patent-facilitated price fixing occurs in a single market. In this Article, we extend conventional analysis to...

Fall Saturdays and college football. The March Madness basketball tournament. The NCAA plays an important role in many Americans’ lives. But for decades, the association has justified its restrictions on compensation to student-athletes on the basis of “amateurism.” Those attempts just ran...

For decades, the NCAA has trumpeted "amateurism" and "student-athletes." But what if this is all a façade? What if these are empty phrases the NCAA hides behind in its embrace of commercialism on the backs of athletes?These are the questions at the heart of Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss's gripping...