As great admirers of The Boss and as fans of live entertainment, we share in the popular dismay over rising ticket prices for live performances. But we have been asked as antitrust scholars to examine the proposed merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and we do so with the objectivity and...

This essay critiques the "shareholder protection" rationale for banning political speech by corporations, a rationale that applies regardless whether the speech occurs in connection with a political campaign. Proponents of this rationale contend that corporate expenditures on such speech...

Most antitrust scholars agree that vertical and horizontal intrabrand restraints such as minimum resale price maintenance and ancillary exclusive territories usually enhance welfare. Nonetheless, there is not universal agreement regarding how, exactly, such restraints have this impact. Following...

This essay explains how one of the most maligned decisions in Constitutional Law, Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905) lives on in one of the Sherman Act’s most celebrated decisions: Standard Oil v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911). Standard Oil, it is shown, was simply an application of...

For over three centuries, Anglo-American courts have assessed employee noncompete agreements under a Rule of Reason. Despite longstanding precedent, some now advocate banning all such agreements. These advocates contend that employers use superior bargaining power to impose such “contracts of...

This essay, prepared for a conference examining Robert Bork’s antitrust contributions, examines Bork’s hitherto unknown role in the transaction cost economics (“TCE”) revolution. The essay recounts how, in 1966, Bork helped rediscover Coase’s 1937 article, The Nature of the Firm and...

During antitrust's "inhospitality era," courts and expert agencies condemned any number of non-standard agreements as "unlawful per se" or nearly so. More recently, courts and agencies have repudiated or softened many such per se rules. In so doing courts and agencies have invoked the lessons of...

Horizontal restraints are unlawful per se unless a court can identify some redeeming virtue that such restraints may create. In National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, the Supreme Court rejected this standard, refusing to condemn horizontal...