Eric A. Posner

Eric Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago. His research interests include financial regulation, antitrust law, and constitutional law. He has written a dozen books and more than a hundred academic articles on law and legal theory. His most recent books are How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford University Press, 2021), Radical Markets (Princeton) (with Glen Weyl), which was named a best book for 2018 by The Economist; Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts (Chicago), which was named a best book for 2018 by The Financial Times; and The Twilight of Human Rights Law (Oxford). He is of counsel at MoloLamken LLP, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Law Institute.

What Is the Role of Economics in Merger Review?

Eric Posner discusses why many antitrust professionals believe the law follows economic interpretation, despite the absence of economics in the relevant statutes. He argues that antitrust laws themselves have been resistant to adopting a coherent "economic theory" approach, leading to a tension between the economic views of agencies and academics versus the legal interpretations taken by courts.

Big Business’ Influence in the Decline of Antitrust Enforcement

Why has antitrust enforcement declined in the United States since the 1970s? Is it due to the preferences of voters, business influence, or an alternative explanation altogether? In this symposium, Jonathan Baker, Eleanor Fox, and Herbert Hovenkamp discuss the findings of Filippo Lancieri, Eric Posner, and Luigi Zingales’ new paper, “The Political Economy of the Decline of Antitrust Enforcement in the United States.” In this article, Posner responds to the discussants' critiques and comments.

Eric Posner: The Role of Consumer Welfare in Merger Enforcement

Eric Posner provides his round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their inception in...

Toward a Market Power Standard for Merger Review

The Stigler Center’s 2023 Antitrust and Competition conference seeks to answer the question: what lays beyond the consumer welfare standard? In advance of the...

Antitrust’s Labor Market Problem

A series of academic studies in recent years highlighted the fact that labor markets are often highly concentrated and that employers use anticompetitive methods...

Senator Klobuchar’s Antitrust Bill Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Senator Klobuchar’s bill includes many useful proposals to bolster antitrust enforcement, but the antitrust laws have been so weakened by the courts and by...

Why the FTC Should Focus on Labor Monopsony

Economic theory tells us that firms are more likely to exploit labor market power than product market power in the United States today. And...

Data Workers of the World, Unite!

With solutions to the threats of digital monopolies currently looking unlikely to come from the state, law and economics scholars Eric Posner and Glen...

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