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This symposium began with a call for papers "reassessing the validity of the Chicago School's assumptions about competition and considering whether a more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement is now warranted." That framing uncritically accepts the premises of antitrust's new populist movement:first, that "the Chicago School" marked an abrupt break from prior academic analysis of antitrust law, and second, that its adherents shared acommonpositive agenda fundamentally at odds with robust antitrust enforcement. Both of those premises are false. The Chicago School represented alogical continuation of the antitrust analysis developed over the preceding decades, and its members shared no positive doctrinal agenda. Instead, they shared acommitment only to promoting consumer interests by means of rigorous economics. Of course, that commitment influenced how the economics profession and antitrust policymakers thought, and progressive "post-Chicago" scholarship today shares the same commitment to consumer welfare and economic rigor. Such scholarship thus has farmore in common with Chicago School scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s than with today's populist movement, which abandons any coherent framework altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case "FTC v Actavis Inc" in which the court held that settlements are subject to antitrust scrutiny because of their potential to artificially extend the monopoly power conferred by a patent. It explores whether and how federal settlement privilege applies in antitrust litigation concerning reverse-payment agreements.

The article informs that largely in connection with the Microsoft litigation, the antitrust enforcement authority of state attorneys general in the United States, in the parens patriae capacity, has generated acrimonious debate. Perhaps the only point of genuine agreement is the complaint over the lack of reliable empirical evidence on state antitrust enforcement. This article attempts to make a modest contribution to the data front and a more ambitious and provocative contribution to the theoretical debate.

This article offers an approach to designing rules for assessing unilateral practices based in part on the error-cost framework pioneered by Judge Frank Easterbrook. Authors in this article summarize economic thinking on the antitrust consequences of unilateral behavior and its impact on the way courts and regulators analyze such behavior. They offer their alternative approach--neo-Chicago approach. They focus (a) on the role of economic theory and evidence in forming presumptions, and (b) on the implications of this approach for the research needed to evaluate unilateral practices.

This article examines the ideal scope for international antitrust rules. It focuses on the particular substantive and procedural provisions that an international antitrust code should have. It is opined that global convergence on competition law has come a long way since the years after the Second World War when the U.S. appeared to be the only country with a vigorous antitrust culture. That process is likely to continue, even if not at the pace some would prefer. The purpose of this article is to suggest which rules would be worth working for, if the world becomes serious about pursuing a global competition agenda.

This article reports that the U.S. Supreme Court stated that alleged insufficient assistance in the provision of service to rivals is not a recognized antitrust claim. Following the Supreme Court's decision, members of the House Judiciary Committee introduced the Clarification of Antitrust Remedies in Telecommunications Act. The 1996 Act's sharing duties require decisions about what network elements and services must be shared, at what prices, with what level of care and on what other terms, and for how long. These judgments are technically complex, requiring an understanding of the operation and economics of telecommunications networks and services. They must be based on facts and reasoned economic analysis and must operate within the statutory constraints of the 1996 Act, like any agency decisions.

This article reports that the U.S. antitrust laws do not regulate the competitive conditions of other nations' economies. But they do regulate conduct, even when it occurs abroad, that harms domestic competition. It is informed that the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act (FTAIA) was meant to provide, but has failed to deliver, clarity respecting the Sherman Act's extraterritorial reach. With the issue ripe for resolution, the Supreme Court in December 2003 granted certiorari in F. Hoffmann-LaRoche Ltd. v Empagran SA, a case involving claims pressed by foreign victims of the global vitamins cartel. It is opined that in the recent litigation over the meaning of the FTAIA, courts have focused on the narrow statutory interpretation questions while neglecting the broader enterprise of developing jurisdictional doctrines appropriate to a globalized economy that induces globalized cartels.

This article reports that antitrust policy toward vertical restraints is the biggest substantive issue facing antitrust. It is opined that the issue of the proper antitrust stance toward vertical restraints may be procedural and institutional as much as it is analytical. It is only recently that antitrust scholars have begun to establish systematically the conditions that sometimes make vertical restraints rational methods of maximizing profits by reducing competition. To the extent that these scholars are persuasive, their findings are consistent with the fundamental premise of the Chicago school that antitrust issues should be analyzed on the assumption that business firms are rational profit maximizers, so that the standard theorems of price theory can be used to predict the competitive effects of a challenged transaction.

This article provides a framework for defining success in government agencies. Building on that definition, the article offers six guiding principles for an effective competition agency. These principles focus not just on the goals for successful policy, but also on how such policy should be created and implemented. Of course, good policy based on sound economics and profound respect for fundamental legal principles is essential. While discussing these guiding principles, the author describes the consensus that has developed regarding the proper goals of competition policy.

The article informs that the period from 1970 to the present--roughly a third of a century--has witnessed profound changes in the quality of regulation at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a remarkable convergence of antitrust enforcement policy between left and right, and between primarily legal as opposed to primarily economic approaches. With respect to substantive law, areas of intellectual debate and uncertainty remain, but viewpoint differences that existed between the 1960s and the 1980s are today vastly reduced. According to the author, it remains to be seen whether pursuit of a sound middle ground, avoiding the extremes of over- or under-enforcement, will continue to characterize antitrust policy at the Federal Trade Commission. Given current agreement on many core principles, that pattern is likely to continue.

The author in this article states that bundling has emerged as one of the most complicated competition policy issues of the day, from markets as ordinary as that for transparent tape to those as complex and fast moving as telecommunications. The author wants to carve off a piece of the bundling question, namely that relating to what he calls scope-of-permission goods. Scope-of-permission goods deliver precisely the same good to each individual but define multiple products through the scope of access--through the scope of permission--which the producer gives to each consumer. Scope-of-permission goods are goods of arbitrary scope, where consumption of the good is non-rivalrous, where users can be excluded from consuming the good--through market organization, technology, or law--and where increments to the good can be added to the good, once they are created, at zero marginal cost.