How Italian Colors Guts Private Antitrust Enforcement by Replacing it with Ineffective Forms of Arbitration

The United States is becoming more like Europe, and not in a good way. For a long time, the central difference between antitrust enforcement in the United States and Europe has been that the United States features not only public enforcement, but a vigorous system of private antitrust enforcement, while in Europe, public agencies have had an effective monopoly on antitrust enforcement. But that difference is on the verge of collapsing. We are achieving a form of convergence; but contrary to expectations, this convergence is not coming from recent European efforts to facilitate private enforcement, which have not yet overcome some serious obstacles on discovery and class actions. Instead, it is coming from the recent US Supreme Court decision in American Express v. Italian Colors Restaurant, which threatens to gut private antitrust enforcement in the United States by replacing it with ineffective forms of arbitration

The Arc and Architecture of Private Enforcement Regimes in the United States and Europe: A View Across the Atlantic

The United States and Europe have traditionally taken very different approaches to the regulation of harmful conduct. Previously, European nations relied almost entirely on the public enforcement of laws, whereas the United States relied on a mix of public and private actors. In the United States, private rights of action have played a central role deterring illegal conduct—and, in fact, provided greater deterrence than public enforcers in some areas of law. They have also allowed injured parties to obtain compensation. Despite their very different histories, the private enforcement systems in the United States and Europe are showing signs of convergence today. Since the 1970s, industry in the United States has waged a potent public relations campaign against private rights of action. This pro-business crusade has depicted corporations as victims of a litigation explosion and cast plaintiffs and their attorneys as unscrupulous mercenaries. This narrative has little, if any, empirical support. Nonetheless, based on this mythology, the Supreme Court and other federal courts have erected a number of procedural obstacles to effective private enforcement of law. While private enforcement is in retreat in the United States, the European Union seeks to strengthen private rights of action, with an emphasis on private enforcement of antitrust law. Recent EU initiatives established some of the foundations for private parties to protect their rights in court. European policymakers, however, have as yet declined to establish effective claims’ aggregation and litigation funding mechanisms, citing the business victimhood mythology spread by private industry in the United States. Encouragingly, a few EU Member States have rejected this paradigm and established some of the elements of strong private rights of action. In particular, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom have passed laws that are likely to foster effective private litigation. A comparative analysis of enforcement institutions on both sides of the Atlantic reveals a complex picture. American and European consumers, workers, and other large groups will generally face major obstacles to vindicating their rights. In cases generating larger individual claims, American and European plaintiffs’ lawyers may still be able to use aggregate settlement procedures to hold corporate defendants to account. When understanding its contribution to the deterrence of harmful conduct, private enforcement has to be viewed together with public enforcement. Because much of the enhancement of private enforcement in the European Union arises in the context of antitrust, it is an area ripe for cross-continent examination. With antitrust, the overall enforcement landscapes in the United States and European Union will likely be drastically different in the medium term. Due to limited public enforcement, a decrease in private lawsuits will severely compromise overall antitrust enforcement in the United States. In Europe, strong public enforcement will offset generally weak private enforcement and result in far more effective protection of consumer rights

Iowa Law Enforcement Academy Annual Report, FY 2009

The Iowa Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) was created by an act of the Iowa legislature in 1967 with its purpose being to upgrade law enforcement to professional status. The specific goals were to maximize training opportunities for law enforcement officers, to coordinate training and to set standards for the law enforcement services. The Academy establishes minimum standards for Iowa law enforcement and grants officer certification. The Academy has the responsibility to de-certify or to suspend officer‟s certification when necessary

Competition law litigation in the UK courts: a study of all cases 2005-2008- Part I

It is clear from a cursory examination of the academic literature in the field that private enforcement is an established, well-developed and vibrant mode of enforcement of US anti trust law, constituting the preponderance of anti trust enforcement activity complemented by public enforcement by the DOJ and FTC. Historically, arange of factors have combined to ensure that private enforcement is effectively the default setting for antitrust enforcement in general, namely the wider litigative culture, the significant period of development of antitrust law and economics, and the specific characeristics of US civil procedure: the rules on discovery, the funding of actions, the availability of class actions and the existence of treble damages actions, together with clarification(and modification)of the legal position in relation to issues such as the passing on defence and standing for indirect purchasers

Insecure Communities: Latino Perceptions of Police Involvement in Immigration Enforcement

This report presents findings from a survey of Latinos regarding their perceptions of law enforcement authorities in light of the greater involvement of police in immigration enforcement. Lake Research Partners designed and administered a randomized telephone survey of 2,004 Latinos living in the counties of Cook (Chicago), Harris (Houston), Los Angeles, and Maricopa (Phoenix).The survey was designed to assess the impact of police involvement in immigration enforcement on Latinos' perceptions of public safety and their willingness to contact the police when crimes have been committed. The survey was conducted in English and Spanish by professional interviewers during the period November 17 to December 10, 2012.Survey results indicate that the increased involvement of police in immigration enforcement has significantly heightened the fears many Latinos have of the police, contributing to their social isolation and exacerbating their mistrust of law enforcement authorities.These findings reveal one of the unintended consequences of the involvement of state and local police in immigration enforcement -- a reduction in public safety as Latinos' mistrust of the police increases as a result of the involvement of police in immigration enforcement

Development and the interaction of enforcement institutions

We examine how institutions that enforce contracts between two parties, producers and consumers, interact in a competitive market with one-sided symmetric information and productivity shocks. We compare an informal enforcement mechanism, reputation, the efficacy of which is enhanced by consumers investing in “connectedness,” with a formal mechanism, legal enforcement, the effectiveness of which can be reduced by producers by means of bribes. When legal enforcement is poor, consumers connect more with one another to improve informal enforcement; in contrast, a well-connected network of consumers reduces producers’ incentives to bribe. In equilibrium, the model predicts a positive relationship between the the frequency of productivity shocks, bribing, and the use of informal enforcement, providing a physical explanation of why developing countries often fail to have efficient legal systems. Firm-level estimations confirm the partial equilibrium implications of the model

Immigration-Related Worksite Enforcement: Performance Measures

[Excerpt] In the spring of 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued new guidance on immigration-related worksite enforcement—the enforcement of prohibitions on the employment of unauthorized aliens in the United States. In the words of DHS, the updated guidance “reflects a renewed Department-wide focus targeting criminal aliens and employers who cultivate illegal workplaces by breaking the country’s laws and knowingly hiring illegal workers.” According to 2008 estimates, there are some 8.3 million unauthorized workers in the U.S. civilian workforce. Questions arise as to how rigorous and effective DHS’s worksite enforcement efforts have been under the Obama Administration and in past years. The department maintains data on several measures that can be used to examine the performance of its worksite enforcement program. Enforcement activity by the Department of Labor (DOL) is also relevant to a discussion of federal efforts to address unauthorized employment. DOL, which is responsible for enforcing minimum wage, overtime pay, and related requirements, focuses a significant percentage of its enforcement resources on a group of low-wage industries that employ large numbers of immigrant—and presumably large numbers of unauthorized—workers

A Rule Set to Detect Interference of Runtime Enforcement Mechanisms

Runtime enforcement aims at verifying the active execution trace of executing software against formally specified properties of the software, and enforcing the properties in case that they are violated in the active execution trace. Enforcement mechanism of individual properties may interfere with each other, causing the overall behavior of the executing software to be erroneous. As the number and the complexity of the properties to be enforced increase, manual detection of the inferences becomes an error-prone and effort-consuming task. Hence, we aim at providing a framework for automatic detection of interferences. As the initial steps to create such a framework, in this paper we first provide formal definitions of an enforcement mechanism and enforcement operators. Second, we define a rule set to detect the interference among properties