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Andrew Gavil examines the Biden Administration's antitrust policy, placing it in the broader historical context of evolving competition law. He questions the fit of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift for antitrust policy and argues instead that Biden's initiatives reflect the unique demands of the digital economy and the true nature of antitrust, which is ever evolving.

As financial markets take on societal challenges like climate change, new research from Robin Döttling, Doron Levit, Nadya Malenko and Magdalena Rola-Janicka explores how shareholder democracy interacts with the political process to impact public goods provisions. The authors investigate the potential of investor-driven governance to supplement the shortfalls of the regulatory system, highlighting both benefits and risks posed by wealth inequality and ESG backlash.

Randy Stutz writes that the Biden administration has recalibrated antirust policy by devoting more equal enforcement attention to competition in buyers’ markets and sellers’ markets, thereby promoting the welfare of both suppliers and consumers. The shift raises questions about whether courts should engage in “multi-market balancing”—the weighing of harms in one market against benefits in a different market—when the interests of suppliers and consumers diverge.

In a new paper, Jonathan Masur and Eric Posner argue that although cost-benefit analysis and originalism seem to belong to different legal worlds, they share a common political history of support from many of the same business interests. In recent years, both have gained wide acceptance across the political spectrum. But the ground may be shifting beneath them, and they now face uncertain futures.

Tim Brennan finds the new shift in antitrust thought and enforcement connected to the Neo-Brandeisian movement to be flawed for the most part. However, he writes that a reinvigorated focus on tacit collusion, which some have blamed on the rise of prices for groceries and apartment rents, may deserve consideration and further study.

Richard S. Markovits discusses the tests of illegality promulgated by United States antitrust law and their moral desirability. He also considers whether there have been any recent shifts in the paradigmatic approaches that are taken to these and other antitrust law/policy issues.

Steven C. Salop writes that the Biden administration oversaw a paradigm shift in antitrust, but it was the full adoption of the ideas of the Post-Chicago school, whose intellectual influence has countered Chicago since the 1980s, rather than the empowerment of the Anti-Monopoly or Neo-Brandeisian school of thought. This latter school of thought played an important role by motivating increased enforcement and corralling political support, even if it did not lead to cases that could not have been brought by Post-Chicagoans.

Daniel Francis reviews the evolutionary and revolutionary dimensions of the Biden administration’s antitrust work, and argues that these two projects have been in deep tension. He concludes that the administration’s evolutionary work within the welfarist paradigm has generated some important successes, but that the revolutionary effort to restore a pre-welfarist vision of antitrust has failed on its own terms — and, in failing, has left welfarism all the stronger.

Herbert Hovenkamp writes that the First Court’s recent ruling against American Airlines and JetBlue for coordinating operations in New York City and Boston exemplifies the correct application of antitrust’s rule of reason, which has troubled courts and plaintiffs and led to underenforcement for decades.

Stigler Center Assistant Director of Programs Matthew Lucky traces the history of ideas about population growth and its relation to welfare from Malthusian concerns of a population bomb to contemporary studies correlating declining birth rates in developed countries with increased investments in human capital and GDP per capita. Scholars now debate what it means for a society to have populations that do not simply stop growing, but rapidly shrink.