Georgetown University Law Center

About: Georgetown University Law Center is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supreme court & Public health. The organization has 585 authors who have published 2488 publications receiving 36650 citations. The organization is also known as: Georgetown Law & GULC.

Joint Response to the House Judiciary Committee on the State of Antitrust Law and Implications for Protecting Competition in Digital Markets

Abstract: Economic research establishes that market power is now a serious problem. Growing market power harms consumers and workers, slows innovation, and limits productivity growth. Market power is on the rise in a number of major industries, including, for example, airlines, brewing, and hospitals, where multiple horizontal mergers that were allowed to proceed without antitrust challenge have markedly increased concentration in important markets and facilitated the exercise of market power. Exclusionary conduct by dominant companies that stifles competition from actual and potential rivals — including nascent rivals with capabilities for challenging a dominant firm’s market power and firms with competing R&D efforts — impairs what is often the most important economic force creating competitive pressure for dominant firms. This concern exists in digital marketplaces. Platforms are often insulated from platform competition to a substantial extent by substantial scale economies in supply and demand (network effects) combined with customer switching costs. Courts have contributed to increased monopoly power through decisions that have weakened the prohibitions against anticompetitive exclusionary conduct and anticompetitive mergers. The antitrust laws, as interpreted and enforced today, are inadequate to confront and deter growing market power in the U.S. economy and unnecessarily limit the ability of antitrust enforcers to address anticompetitive conduct. Many key antitrust precedents — particularly those precedents governing exclusionary conduct — rely on unsound economic theories or unsupported empirical claims about the competitive effects of certain practices. In part for this reason, the antitrust rules constructed by the courts reflect a systematically skewed error cost balance: they are too concerned to avoid both chilling procompetitive conduct and the high costs of litigation, and too dismissive of the costs of failing to deter harmful conduct. Excessively permissive precedents and unsound or unsupported economic claims have, in turn, encouraged overly cautious enforcement policies and overly demanding proof requirements and have discouraged government enforcers and private plaintiffs from bringing meritorious exclusionary conduct cases. The statement discusses a number of legal rules that are unsupported by or inconsistent with sound economic research that have contributed to overly permissive rules. The signatories to this letter strongly believe that antitrust enforcement has become too lax, in large part because of the courts and that Congress must act to correct this problem. The statement suggests a number of reforms could be considered. We do not collectively or unanimously endorse any of these, though some of us have done so in other contexts. We do believe that Congress has a historic opportunity to identify adverse trends in judicial interpretation of the antitrust and correct problems—not just by overriding damaging precedents, but also by reshaping the antitrust laws more broadly to enhance deterrence of anticompetitive conduct.

Why Did Law Professors Misunderestimate the Lawsuits against PPACA

Abstract: Almost without exception, law professors dismissed the possibility that the Patient Protection and Affordable Act Act ("PPACA") might be unconstitutional -- but something went wrong on the way to the courthouse. What explains the epic failure of law professors to accurately predict how Article III judges would handle the case? After considering three possible defenses/justifications, this essay identifies five factors that help explain the erroneous predictions of our nation’s elite law professors, who were badly wrong, but never in doubt.

The Value of Public Deliberation in Public Health Preparedness

Abstract: Baum and colleagues (2009) offer valuable empirical evidence for assessing the value of public deliberation as a tool of public health preparedness in an emergency. Their focus on social distancing...

Bird Flu, the OIE, and National Regulation: The WTO's India–Agricultural Products Dispute

Abstract: This paper provides a legal-economic assessment of issues arising in the Panel Report over the WTO's India–Agricultural Products dispute, one of a growing list of disputes arising at the intersection of the WTO and domestic regulatory policy over human, animal, or plant health. This dispute featured allegations that India's import measures applied against avian influenza- (AI-) infected countries over poultry and related products were too restrictive, in light of the World Organisation for Animal Health's (OIE's) scientifically motivated standards and guidelines. We rely on insights from a set of economic models of commercial poultry markets in the presence of negative externalities such as AI. We use such models to motivate critical tradeoffs arising at the intersection of government regulatory regimes designed to deal with AI and how they fit alongside trade agreements such as the WTO and standard-setting bodies such as the OIE, which combine to impose constraints on regulatory and trade policy. While we find the institutional design of the OIE to be well-motivated and we are in broad agreement with the overall thrust of the Panel Report in the dispute, we also highlight a number of subtle issues which pose long-term challenges for the multilateral trading system's ability to balance trade rules with public health concerns.

Law's Visual Afterlife: Violence, Popular Culture, and Translation Theory

Abstract: In Walter Benjamin’s essay, "The Task of the Translator," Benjamin argues that translations enable a work’s afterlife. Afterlife is not what happens after death but what allows a work (or event or idea) to go on living and to evolve over time and place and iteration. In its afterlife, the original is transformed and renewed. In this piece I explore film’s visual translation of law and the role film plays in law’s afterlife. Film translates law not by translating from one language to another, but by translating between media and discourses. The cultural-critical lens of translation highlights the discursive similarities and dissonances between law and film; it allows us to see the legal in the aesthetic and the aesthetic in the legal; and it gives us new purchase on thinking about the ways that word, image, power and justice operate in and through different media. I take up the western HBO series Deadwood and the science fiction film Serenity to explore the representations of law, state and violence at the borderlands of time, place and authority in order to illustrate the layers of legal translation that film can occasion.My argument focuses on how a few specific scenes translate the dilemmas of state authority, violence and law into the visual, and explores how the visual translations allow a different retelling of legal concerns. I also re-read the film genres in which these specific legal preoccupations most often circulate as legal genres. Both the western and science fiction, as genres, offer two parallel narratives about a foundational problem in law - the relationship of the state to violence. The narratives of the western tend to be progressive yet nostalgic; they are stories about the coming of civilization and the largely successful efforts of the state to reign in excessive private violence by exercising a monopoly on violence. But they are nostalgic for the kind of men - moral individualists - who were the precursors to the state but whose existence is incompatible with state power. The narratives of science fiction are more often dystopic and its stories about law and violence come in two versions. In one version, science fiction portrays the state as perfecting its monopoly on violence to the point of abuse. The state itself becomes the perpetrator of excessive violence. Another version of the science fiction genre narrates the future breakdown of the state, the dissolution of its monopoly on force and the return to private violence. This second version is a marriage of the two genres - the futuristic western. These two film genres in particular often translate the legal anxiety over the state’s unstable relationship to violence in such a way as to give visual life to its instability, an instability that is both suppressed in and central to legal discourse.