Robert H. Lande

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• JD, MPP and BA
• Professsor Emeritus at University of Baltimore

This article demonstrates that there is not now, and there should not be, an efficiencies rebuttal, defense, or exception in merger cases. A textualist analysis demonstrates that it does not exist in the plain words of the anti-merger statute, which prevents mergers that “may be substantially to lessen competition or to tend to create a monopoly.”...

On May 1, 2019, Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education — two of the three largest college textbook publishers — announced plans to merge. The merger would turn the college textbook market into an effective duopoly, dominated by the combined post-merger company and a single rival, Pearson. This merger would have drastic negative consequences for competit...

Amicus brief by antitrust scholars in appeal of AT&T/Time Warner merger ruling.

In this journal, James Langenfeld critically reviewed four of the present authors’ articles that analyze the size of cartel overcharges and their antitrust policy implications. In this comment, we explain why we believe Langenfeld errs in his criticism of our work. In particular, this comment discusses the variation in research quality of the sourc...

Iowa Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2548712 Abstract: law provides treble damages for victims of antitrust violations, but the vast majority of private cases settle. The average or median size of these settlements relative to the overcharges involved has, until now, been only the subject of anecdotes or specula...

The four of us are known in antitrust circles for the points on which we disagree. We do agree, however, that price fixing among competitors is inadequately deterred, is often profitable despite existing fines and damages actions, and that it's time to focus more on the individuals who participate in illegal cartels. We propose that, as part of its...

The European Commission's proposed Directive concerning private enforcement of Competition Law certainly would be beneficial for victims of anticompetitive conduct because it would allow some victims to obtain a certain degree of compensation. It does not, however, go nearly far enough. Because it does not allow opt-out class action or contingent f...

This Comment was submitted to the US Sentencing Commission on behalf of the American Antitrust Institute. It makes three important points, all of which concern the US Sentencing Commission's Antitrust Guidelines' cartel overcharge presumption. First, the evidence demonstrates there currently is significant underdeterrence of price fixing and other...

This article determines the overall purpose of the Antitrust statutes in two very different ways. First, it performs a traditional analysis of the legislative history of the Antitrust laws by analyzing relevant legislative debates and committee reports. Second, it undertakes a textualist or "plain meaning" determination of the purpose of the Antitr...

This article examines whether the "old media" and the "new media", including the Internet, should be considered to be within the same relevant market for antitrust purposes. To do this the article first demonstrates that proper antitrust consideration of the role of non-price competition necessitates that “news” and “journalism” be analyzed in two...

The conventional wisdom is that private antitrust enforcement lacks any value. Indeed, skepticism of private enforcement has been so great that its critics make contradictory claims. The first major line of criticism is that private enforcement achieves too little — it does not even minimally compensate the actual victims of antitrust violations an...

This compares the quality of the "old" media to that of the "new" media by determining how often each type of media source wins major journalism awards. It divides media sources into three categories: old, new and hybrid. New media is limited to publications that were started purely as online news publications. Old media is classified in the tradit...

Judge Robert Bork was undeniably one of the towering figures in antitrust history. He advanced the field positively in many respects, articulating a serious critique of excesses of an earlier social-political approach to antitrust. But as one of the conservative movement’s intellectual godfathers he also shares responsibility for many of their own...

Maryland is one of the few remaining states that still evaluates accidents using the contributory negligence approach. There is a movement within the state to change to the comparative negligence approach, but so far this reform effort has not succeeded. This short piece analyzes the issues involved and concludes that Maryland should enact legislat...

This article is the first to analyze whether cartel sanctions are optimal. The conventional wisdom is that the current level of sanctions is adequate or excessive. The article demonstrates, however, that the combined level of current United States cartel sanctions is only 9% to 21% as large as it should be to protect potential victims of cartelizat...

Cartels are illegal in India, as they are almost everywhere. They are subject to heavy fines. Why, then, do businesses frequently try to fix prices? Because doing so usually is profitable. On average cartels raise prices by more than 20%, and probably face less than a 25% chance of being caught and convicted. Based upon a sample of 75 international...

This article is both a short introduction to the Consumer Choice explanation for Competition Law or Antitrust Law, and also a short advocacy piece suggesting that Consumer Choice is the best way to articulate the goals of European Competition Law and United States Antitrust Law. This article briefly: 1. defines the consumer choice approach to antit...

In 2011, we documented an extraordinary but usually overlooked fact: private antitrust enforcement deters a significant amount of anticompetitive conduct. Indeed the article showed that private enforcement probably deters even more anticompetitive conduct than the almost universally admired anticartel enforcement program of the United States Depart...

The dominant view in the antitrust field is that private enforcement cases, and especially class actions, accomplish little or nothing positive but, on the contrary, are counterproductive. Despite strongly worded convictions, that view has been premised on anecdotal, self-serving and insufficiently substantiated claims. Indeed, the authors' 2008 st...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is rumored to be deciding whether to bring a “pure Section 5” case against Google as a result of complaints that the company unfairly favors its own offerings over those of its rivals in its search results. But the case will fail miserably at the hands of a reviewing court and the agency will be confined to relativ...

This document summarizes twenty cases of successful private antitrust enforcement. These twenty summaries build on earlier summaries of forty additional cases of successful private enforcement available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1105523. An analysis of the data from the original forty cases is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1090661 (publis...

As the final judgment in the celebrated Microsoft case ends, this piece very briefly assesses the impact of its remedy. When evaluated in terms of its most important goals, the remedy has proven to be a failure. Microsoft's monopoly power in the PC operating systems market is now as great as it was when the case was brought in 1998 or the remedy wa...

Globalisation of business makes it important for firms to predict how their behaviour is likely to be treated in the roughly 200 nations that have competition laws. In that context, a crucial question is: are we in a position to develop a common intellectual framework that would give coherence to policy statements made on specific competition relat...

This short piece takes a first step toward providing the empirical bases for an assessment of the benefits of private enforcement. It presents evidence showing that private enforcement of the antitrust laws is serving its intended purposes and is in the public interest. Private enforcement helps compensate victimized consumers, and it also helps de...

This article briefly compares and contrasts the recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust settlement with Intel, and the antitrust cases brought against Microsoft. The article praises the FTC's settlement with Intel, and predicts that history will judge it very favorably compared to the settlement by the U.S. Department of Justice of its ant...

This compares the magnitudes of two forms of economic interaction between the developed and developing world. The first is the amount of economic foreign aid provided by the developed world to the developing world during a single year. The second is an estimate of the yearly amount that illegal price fixing cartels, comprised of companies from the...

This article shows that private enforcement of the U. S. antitrust laws-which usually is derided as essentially worthless-serves as a more important deterrent of anticompetitive behavior than the most esteemed antitrust program in the world, criminal enforcement by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.The debate over the value o...

This short article analyzes the "pure" Section 5 allegations in the recent FTC complaint against Intel. It first shows that Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act is more encompassing than the Sherman Act and why this breath is in the public interest. It next analyzes allegations from the Intel Complaint, showing why each appears to be in th...

This article will (1) define the consumer choice approach to competition law or antitrust law and show how it differs from other approaches; (2) discuss the types of situations where a consumer choice focus is likely to make a difference in enforcement outcomes, producing better results than the other paradigms; (3) show that another important adva...

The mission of the antitrust laws need to be clarified, and this article asserts that the best way to do this is to interpret and enforce these laws in terms of consumer choice. This reformulation is necessary due to uncertainty and instability that exists in the field. This article will 1. define the consumer choice approach to antitrust or compet...

This articles discusses Intel's claim that the EU's fine against it for a competition law violation was so large that its human rights' were violated.

The May 13, 2009 decision by the European Commission ('EC') holding that Intel violated Article 82 of the Treaty of Rome and should be fined a record amount and prohibited from engaging in certain conduct, set off a predictable four part chorus of denunciations: 1. Intel did nothing wrong and was just competing hard; 2. Intel’s discounts were good...

This article assesses some of the benefits of private enforcement of the United States antitrust laws by analyzing forty large recent, successful private cases. It should help in assessing the desirability and efficacy of private enforcement - information that may prove useful to jurisdictions contemplating a private right of action for competition...

This article analyzes the Canadian Superior Propane decision, apparently the first merger decision in world history to consider explicitly what to do when a merger was predicted to lead to both higher consumer prices and to net efficiencies. The article advocates analyzing the merger under a "price to consumers" or "consumer welfare" standard, rath...

This article traces the evolution of federal merger policy. It documents how merger enforcement originally was largely based upon very strong structural presumptions. These presumptions gradually eroded and other factors became more and more important in enforcement decisions. Today meger enforcement essentially consists of structural safe harbors...

This article is from a symposium, "Five Approaches to Legal Reasoning in the Classroom: Contrasting Perspectives on O'Brien v. Cunard S.S. Co. Ltd.," 57 Missouri L. Rev. 345 (1992). The symposium contains five articles that analyze this case from, respectively, traditionalist, Law & Economics, Critical Legal Studies, Feminist, and Critical Race The...

This paper makes two points. First, Section 5 of the FTC Act, properly construed, is indeed significantly broader and more encompassing than the Sherman Act or Clayton Act. Section 5 violations include incipient violations of the other antitrust laws, and also violations of their policy or spirit. Second, the best - and probably the only - way to i...

This chapter examines how high cartels raise prices on average and what this should mean for the current criminal fine levels in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. We utilize two distinct data sets (economic and other studies, and verdicts in final cartel cases) and find that cartels have caused average overcharges in the range of 31 to 49 percent and...

Chicago School antitrust policy rests on the premise that the purpose of the antitrust laws is to promote economic efficiency. That foundation is flawed. The fundamental goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers. This essay defines the relevant economic concepts, summarizes the legislative histories, and analyzes recent case law. All these fact...

Many instances of anticompetitive collusion are designed not to affect prices and output directly, but rather to shape the rules under which competition takes place. They help to cushion competitors from hard competition through such "rules" as restraints on advertising, sham ethical codes, or bans on discounts, coupons, "free" services, or extende...

This article examines five common beliefs about antitrust damages and shows they all are untrue.Myth #1. Antitrust violations give rise to treble damages.Myth #2. There is "duplication" of antitrust damages because many defendants pay six-fold or more damages.Myth #3. Courts should go easy on defendants when formulating liability rules or calculati...

This short piece considers whether the EU antitrust action against Intel constitutes an example of European regulators attacking a successful US company in order to protect a European competitor, or whether it instead is an example of legitimate law enforcement.

This short piece gives an overview of antitrust actions filed around the world against Intel for allegedly undertaking anticompetitive actions in the market for X 86 PC chips.

This short piece explains how the first unit discounts or rebates allegedly given by Intel on their X86 chips could harm competition, innovation, and PC purchasers in this crucial $33 billion/year market. For these reasons, their discounts or rebates could violate European Competition law and U.S. Antitrust law.

This article seeks an answer to a question that should be well settled: for purposes of antitrust analysis, what is 'market power' and/or 'monopoly power'? The question should be well settled because antitrust law requires proof of actual or likely market power or monopoly power to establish most types of antitrust violations. Examination of key an...

This article briefly describes the revolutionary potential of the Supreme Court's Kodak decision. It discusses the dramatic changes in antitrust that would occur if the field took concepts such as imperfect information, lock-in effects, strategic behavior, and other post-Chicago ideas seriously. Among the effects of this decision could be: (1) Impe...

The merger incipiency doctrine is virtually ignored in the courts today. This article argues that it should be resurrected, and it also explores the ways that effectuating Congressional intent in the area would reinvigorate merger policy.The article documents how the legislative history of the antimerger statutes shows that Congress intended merger...

When should the government challenge a merger that might increase market power but also generate efficiency gains? The dominant belief has been that the government and courts should evaluate these mergers solely in terms of economic efficiency. Congress, however, wanted the courts to stop any merger significantly likely to raise prices. Substantial...

his Article will show that antitrust violations do not actually give rise to "treble" damages. When viewed correctly, antitrust damages awards are approximately equal to, or are in fact less than, the actual damages caused by antitrust violations.The article demonstrates this by analyzing the relatively quantifiable harms from antitrust violations,...

Collusion can profitably be classified into three distinct types. In our classification, "Type I" collusion is the familiar direct agreement among colluding firms (a cartel) to raise prices or, equivalently, restrict output. Alternatively, firms can collude to disadvantage rivals in ways that causes those rivals to cut output. We term this "Type II...

This article is about the relationship between antitrust and consumer protection law. Its purpose is to define each area of law, to delineate the boundary between them, to show how they interact with each other, and to show how they ultimately support one another as the two component parts of an overarching unity: effective consumer choice (also ca...

Should unions and corporations be treated identically under the antitrust laws? This article explores this provocative question by examining whether union mergers should be subject to the antitrust laws. Currently unions and corporations are treated very differently. Large corporate mergers are blocked if their effect "may be substantially to lesse...

The current paradigms of antitrust law - price and efficiency - do not work well enough. They were an immense improvement over their predecessors, and they have served the field competently for a generation, producing reasonably accurate results in most circumstances. Accu mulated experience has also revealed their shortcomings, however. They are h...

The purpose of this commentary is to analyze some of the empirical issues that help lay the foundation for the policy conclusions in the excellent and provocative article by Professor Herbert Hovenkamp, Discounts and Exclusion.This Article argues that, because there is no support for these empirical assertions, policymakers should reject the policy...

Privacy and antitrust? Isn't antitrust only supposed to be concerned with price? Well, no. Antitrust is actually about consumer choice, and price is only one type of choice. The ultimate purpose of the antitrust laws is to help ensure that the free market will bring to consumers everything they want from competition. This starts with competitive pr...

The conventional wisdom is that current antitrust damage levels are too high, lead to overdeterrence, and should be cut back. Although most agree that threefold damages are fine for cartels, the combination of treble damages to direct purchasers and another treble damages to indirect purchasers typically is denounced as duplicative, a mess, or the...

The conventional wisdom in the antitrust community is that the purpose of the antitrust laws is to promote economic efficiency. That view is incorrect. As this article shows, the fundamental goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers. This article defines the relevant economic concepts, summarizes the legislative histories, analyzes recent case...

This Paper presents information about forty of the largest recent successful private antitrust cases. To do this, the paper gathers information about each case, including, inter alia, (1) the amount of money each action recovered for the victims of each alleged antitrust violation, (2) what proportion of the money was recovered from foreign entitie...

The goal of this Report is to take a first step toward providing an empirical basis for assessing whether private enforcement of the antitrust laws is serving its intended purposes and is in the public interest. To do this the Report assembles, aggregates, and analyzes information about forty of the largest recent successful private antitrust cases...

Illinois Brick held that only direct purchasers successfully can sue for damages under federal antitrust law. Since this left most true victims of antitrust violations without an effective remedy, most states enacted Illinois Brick Repealers (IBRs), to give indirect purchasers the right to sue for damages when firms violate analogous state laws.Alt...

This Article examines whether the current penalties in the United States Sentencing Guidelines are set at the appropriate levels to deter illegal price fixing cartels optimally. The authors analyze two data sets to determine how high on average cartels raise prices. The first consists of every published scholarly economic study of the effects of ca...

There are two very different sources of market power in antitrust cases. The first is traditional market sharebased market power. Market power in antitrust cases also can come from deception, significantly imperfect or asymmetric information, or other types of market failures that usually are associated with consumer protection violations. When the...

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the current cartel fine levels of the European Union and the United States are at the optimal levels. The article does this by collecting and analyzing the available information concerning the size of the overcharges caused by hard core pricing fixing, bid rigging, and market allocation agreements. Da...

The distinctive system of private enforcement that we have in this country is substantially underappreciated. Congress's venerable "private Attorney General" idea2 has produced tremendous benefits for the United States economy - for businesses of all sizes and, ultimately, for consumers. It has helped to deter anticompetitive behavior and to compen...

Our survey identified about 200 serious social-science studies of cartels which contained 674 observations of average overcharges. Our primary finding is that the median cartel overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods has been 25%; 17-19% for domestic cartels, and 30-33% for international cartels. Thus, in general, international ca...

What do exit polls and flu vaccine shortages have in common? Both involve situations where society has come to rely excessively on too few entities. When even one company makes a mistake society can suffer significantly. This short piece advocates that we abandon our almost laissez faire tolerence towards high concentration, and rely upon competiti...

The conventional antitrust wisdom is that buyer side market power or monopsony is so unusual and so rarely anticompetitive that it should not merit more than a scholarly afterthought. Moreover, these brief mentions typically say it is essentially the mirror image of seller power or that, while seller-side power is suspect since it leads to higher c...

This short article applauds the European Commission for holding that Microsoft violated European competition laws, and admonishes the U.S. for criticizing the Europeans for protecting themselves from Microsoft's anticompetitive activity.

This is a submission to the FTC that discusses this agency's use of disgorgement as a remedy in Antitrust matters. It strongly supports the Commission's use of the disgorgement remedy, and gives reasons why the public interest would be enhanced if the agency used this remedy more often. This document was submitted on behalf of the American Antitrus...

This is an introduction to a symposium on Creating Competition for Transition Economies. This article provides an overview of the topic, and also briefly introduces the authors of the articles in the symposium; William Kovacic, Eleanor Fox, Spencer Weber Waller, Malcolm Coate, and Armando Rodriguez.

This article is about the relationship between antitrust and consumer protection law. Its purpose is to define each area of law, to delineate the boundary between them, to show how they interact with each other, and to show how they ultimately support one another as the two components of a single overarching unity. That overarching unity is consume...

This article explores when efforts by firms to restrict reverse engineering of their software, and corresponding agreements by other firms not to reverse engineer this software, could raise significant antitrust issues. This article provides an overview of how the laws prohibiting certain acts of monopolization, attempted monopolization, refusals t...

The Sherman Antitrust Law is the principal federal statute regulating anti-competitive conduct. This volume examines the rich legislative history and political economy of the Act and the current debates which surround it. The contributors include: Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Charles Rule, Louis Kaplow, and Eleanor Fox.