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Patents and Price Fixing by Serial Colluders
Get PDFAntitrust 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 address firms’ patent misuse to facilitate price fixing across multiple products lines. By doing so, we expose gaps in existing agency enforcement and scholarly proposals for reform. Important legal tests that make sense in the single market setting do not carry over to the context we call serial collusion, where certain offenders engage in repeat collusion across product lines. This Article argues that there is an urgent need to recast these tests to address serial collusion of the sort that prevails in the chemicals, auto parts and electronics industries. To support this argument, we develop empirical evidence consistent with the possibility that serial colluders in the chemical industry acquired and used patents to support their collusion, either directly to coordinate and monitor output and pricing or indirectly to deter new firm entry by erecting patent thickets as a barrier to entry. Throughout this Article, we describe the flaws of current antitrust doctrine when it comes to assessing patents and price fixing, suggest doctrinal improvements, and provide guidance to antitrust enforcers about how to better understand and combat serial collusion facilitated by patents
Tribute to Bob Burdick
Get PDFIn losing Bob, we have truly lost a legal giant. He was a visionary in poverty law. He led significant litigation that improved the lives of countless individuals in the Commonwealth. It is because of him, a team of legal aid attorneys, and his students that individuals who are considered mentally incapacitated are entitled to Rogers hearings before being administered medication. It is also under his leadership that student attorneys throughout the Commonwealth can get attorney’s fees for their legal services organizations. Through his guidance and teaching, generations of law students have learned how to infuse their work (wherever they may end up working) with a discrimination and poverty law lens
Marijuana Legalization and the Role of the Massachusetts Legislature
Get PDFThe public is often frustrated when Congress or their state legislature is not responsive to their policy priorities. This was especially true during the effort to legalize marijuana in Massachusetts. The legislature consistently refused to take up the issue despite public support. Legalization advocates ultimately bypassed the legislature by turning to the ballot-initiative process on three occasions: first to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, then to legalize medical marijuana, and most recently to legalize recreational marijuana. After the electorate legalized recreational marijuana, the legislature further frustrated advocates, first by delaying implementation of key parts of the law and later by making significant changes. Despite the fierce criticism of the legislators for attempting to thwart the will of the people, this Essay argues that the Legislature acted in a responsible and effective manner. By giving a detailed history of the legislative activity during the legalization effort, this Essay attempts to show that the state legislature demonstrated valuable traits, including being appropriately cautious when legalizing a range of products that would require extensive regulation, properly considering the concerns of various constituencies, considering the available evidence, and effectively balancing the role of the executive branch
The Color Line: A Review and Reflection for Antiracist Scholars
Get PDFIn The Color Line: A Short Introduction, David Lyons provides a valuable service to students and academics in law, social sciences, and humanities by providing a concise history of the development and maintenance of race and racial order through law, policy, and discrimination in the United States. Lyons effectively outlines how race and racism were developed through these mechanisms in an effort to facilitate and maintain white supremacy
Mass. must be proactive to protect public safety
No full textMany in Massachusetts were shocked and saddened last month when the Supreme Court refused to block Texas’ law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people know they are pregnant. Fortunately, Massachusetts was prepared for this — in 2020, the Legislature codified abortion rights in state law. But the next shoe to drop will hit closer to home: The court is expected to expand the right to carry guns in public. The Legislature has an opportunity to limit the negative impact of this decision by acting now to draft a comprehensive concealed carry law that will withstand judicial scrutiny while still protecting residents from the worst effects of public gun carrying
What the public doesn’t get: Anti-CRT lawmakers are passing pro-CRT laws
No full textSince the final months of the Trump administration, the Republican Party has waged a sustained assault on critical race theory. Otherwise known as “CRT,” this academic framework offers tools to illuminate the relationship among race, racism and the law. Through calculated caricature and distortion, right-wing think tanks and media have weaponized CRT to manufacture a culture war that recasts antiracism as the new racism
Ten Truths about Tax Havens: Inclusion and the Liberia Problem
Get PDFThere has been a decades-long effort to repair an increasingly fragile international tax system. One reason it has foundered has been what we identify as the Liberia problem. In 2000, the powerful Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development identified Liberia but not Switzerland as a tax haven and targeted it for sanctions. It did not go well. During the two decades since, everything has changed; yet seemingly from this lens of inclusion, nothing has changed at all. Awkwardly similar blacklists still target Black and Brown jurisdictions despite the fact that experts mean something quite different when they speak of the scourge of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions. We think differently in important respects but believe that those real disagreements demonstrate the need for a less insular global tax policymaking apparatus. And we share a conviction that a more inclusive and more level playing field in the international tax arena would benefit all states. To show why, we offer a series of truths designed to prompt a long-overdue conversation about perceptions of bias and privilege in international taxation
Third Party Funding of Investment Arbitration
Get PDFThis Essay discusses Third-Party Funding in Investment Arbitration. It describes the rise of third-party funding of investment arbitration; the debate over the definition of litigation/arbitration finance; the forms arbitration finance takes; the normative debate in favor and against third-party funding of investment arbitration; the effects of arbitration funding on the arbitral process; developments in national, international, and soft law governing investment arbitration funding; and the likely effects of third-party funding on the international bar
Ask a Feminist: Deborah Anker Discusses Gender and Asylum Law
No full textHow has feminism shaped US asylum law? Why and how is the Trump administration trying to undo feminist gains? In this episode of Ask a Feminist, asylum- and refugee-law expert Deborah Anker discusses the history and present of gender in the US asylum system. Anker is the founder and director of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Law Clinical Program and is one of the most widely known asylum scholars and practitioners in the United States. She speaks to Aziza Ahmed, professor of law at Northeastern University School of Law, and takes us through the key cases and arguments that have led to the current moment, the transformations the system is currently undergoing, and why she is less pessimistic than might be expected