Extending Predation Analysis to Monopolist\u27s Bundled Discounts under Section 2: An Economic, Legal, and Comparative Perspective

In LePage’s v. 3M, the Third Circuit decided the first case at the federal appellate court level that dealt with the subject of bundled discounts by a monopolist under Section 2 of the Sherman Act in the period following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation. Prior to the decision in Brooke Group, the Third Circuit had only once before addressed this topic in Smithkline Corp. v. Eli Lilly and Company. Smithkline is only significant because it nearly suggested that any bundled discount, regardless of whether above or below cost, was anti-competitive. At the time of Smithkline in 1978, the Third Circuit had therefore not even considered monopolist bundled discounts with regard to products in the same relevant market as constituting a very serious legal issue. Following Brooke Group, however, practitioners believed that this state of affairs had changed. It is only well in the aftermath of Brooke Group, following the LePage’s Inc. v. 3M decision, that this issue has become the subject of vigorous debate. This Article explores how the Third Circuit should have decided in Lepage’s and provides an answer to what should be the proper U.S. jurisprudence with regard to this issue in light of Brooke Group and U.S. economic theory. This Article then proceeds to question this ideal U.S. jurisprudence by providing an EC comparative perspective. In doing so, this Article tries not to laud one standard over the other, but to precisely understand the philosophies, advantages, and disadvantages that underlie each system beyond the veil of law and economics

Jurisdictional Competition in the European Community

The main purpose of this article is to analyze how four company law cases (Daily Mail, Centros, Uberseering, and Inspire Art) in the European Community have expanded the Freedom of Establishment to potentially open the door to corporate jurisdictional competition in the European Community, similar to the sort that exists in the United States through the Delaware effect. However, in Europe, this type of jurisdictional competition has traditionally been thought of as undesirable, particularly in certain Member States such as Germany that have co-determination and minimum capital requirements. These Member States have continued to adhere to the real seat and stakeholder theory doctrines and it is highly likely that they will continue to try to employ national level restrictions in order to evade the evolving EC jurisprudence and to ultimately evade jurisdictional competition. Recently, the SE statute was enacted. This statute on its face appears inconsistent with the evolving case law that appears to open the door to jurisdictional competition, and to therefore potentially further the cause of the anti-jurisdictional competition Member States. However, this article shows that the SE statute will most likely not halt jurisdictional competition due to a loophole in the SE statute that allows a European SE company to merge into a national subsidiary and in a two year period to become subject to the law of that Member State. Although Member States such as Germany will be able to continue to burden emigration by potentially imposing tax constraints or appraisal rights, such Member States will risk not being able to participate in the forthcoming European international corporate reorganization movement. As a result, this article predicts that in the long run, a full jurisdictional competition will ensue in Europe, to the detriment of the values embodied in the stakeholder theory of corporate law

Report of the Subgroup on Alternative Models and New Ideas

We summarize some of the work done by the P3 subgroup on Alternative Models and New Ideas. The working group covered a broad range of topics including a constrained Standard Model from an extra dimension, a discussion of recent ideas addressing the strong CP problem, searches for doubly charged higgs bosons in e gamma collisions, and an update on discovery limits for extra neutral gauge bosons at hadron colliders. The breadth of topics reflects the many ideas and approaches to physics beyond the Standard Model.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Contributed to the APS/DPF/DPB Summer Study on the Future of Particle Physics (Snowmass 2001), Snowmass, Colorado, 30 Jun - 21 Jul 200

Magnetic Flux of EUV Arcade and Dimming Regions as a Relevant Parameter for Early Diagnostics of Solar Eruptions - Sources of Non-Recurrent Geomagnetic Storms and Forbush Decreases

This study aims at the early diagnostics of geoeffectiveness of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from quantitative parameters of the accompanying EUV dimming and arcade events. We study events of the 23th solar cycle, in which major non-recurrent geomagnetic storms (GMS) with Dst <-100 nT are sufficiently reliably identified with their solar sources in the central part of the disk. Using the SOHO/EIT 195 A images and MDI magnetograms, we select significant dimming and arcade areas and calculate summarized unsigned magnetic fluxes in these regions at the photospheric level. The high relevance of this eruption parameter is displayed by its pronounced correlation with the Forbush decrease (FD) magnitude, which, unlike GMSs, does not depend on the sign of the Bz component but is determined by global characteristics of ICMEs. Correlations with the same magnetic flux in the solar source region are found for the GMS intensity (at the first step, without taking into account factors determining the Bz component near the Earth), as well as for the temporal intervals between the solar eruptions and the GMS onset and peak times. The larger the magnetic flux, the stronger the FD and GMS intensities are and the shorter the ICME transit time is. The revealed correlations indicate that the main quantitative characteristics of major non-recurrent space weather disturbances are largely determined by measurable parameters of solar eruptions, in particular, by the magnetic flux in dimming areas and arcades, and can be tentatively estimated in advance with a lead time from 1 to 4 days. For GMS intensity, the revealed dependencies allow one to estimate a possible value, which can be expected if the Bz component is negative.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in Solar Physic