Herbert Hovenkamp as Antitrust Oracle: Appreciating the Overlooked Contributions of the New Harvard School

My colleague, Herbert Hovenkamp, is almost universally recognized as the most cited and the most authoritative US antitrust scholar. Among his many honors, his status as the senior author of the authoritative Areeda and Hovenkamp treatise makes him the unquestioned leader of the New Harvard School, which has long served as the bellwether for how courts are likely to resolve emerging issues in modern antitrust doctrine. Unfortunately, its defining tenets and its positions on emerging issues remain surprisingly obscure. My contribution to this festschrift explores the core commitments that distinguish the New Harvard School from other approaches to antitrust. It then explores Hovenkamp’s scholarship on key issues, including tying, the neo-Brandeisian/hipster antitrust movement, and digital platforms. A better understanding of Hovenkamp’s work and the New Harvard School should prove invaluable to anyone wishing to understand antitrust’s likely future

Proving the Obvious: The Antitrust Laws Were Passed to Protect Consumers (Not Just to Increase Efficiency)

Sometimes an entire field goes astray. When its dominant members make a major mistake, an opportunity arises for someone to say, The emperor has no clothes. This is what happened to the antitrust world during much of the 1970s and 1980s. These circumstances gave me the opening and motivation to write the article that appeared in the Hastings Law Journal in 1982 (Wealth Transfers as the Original and Primary Concern of Antitrust: The Efficiency Interpretation Challenged, hereafter Wealth Transfers)

Proving the Obvious: The Antitrust Laws Were Passed to Protect Consumers (Not Just to Increase Efficiency)

Sometimes an entire field goes astray. When its dominant members make a major mistake, an opportunity arises for someone to say, The emperor has no clothes. This is what happened to the antitrust world during much of the 1970s and 1980s. These circumstances gave me the opening and motivation to write the article that appeared in the Hastings Law Journal in 1982 (Wealth Transfers as the Original and Primary Concern of Antitrust: The Efficiency Interpretation Challenged, hereafter Wealth Transfers)

The Post-Chicago Antitrust Revolution: A Retrospective

A symposium examining the contributions of the post-Chicago School provides an appropriate opportunity to offer some thoughts on both the past and the future of antitrust. This afterword reviews the excellent papers with an eye toward appreciating the contributions and limitations of both the Chicago School, in terms of promoting the consumer welfare standard and embracing price theory as the preferred mode of economic analysis, and the post-Chicago School, with its emphasis on game theory and firm-level strategic conduct. It then explores two emerging trends, specifically neo-Brandeisian advocacy for abandoning consumer welfare as the sole goal of antitrust and the increasing emphasis on empirical analyses. Antitrust law & policy, competition, political economy, economic theory, empiricism, intellectual history, consumer welfare, economic efficiency, price theory, Chicago & Harvard School