June 29, 2007

When the only tool in your toolbelt is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The Supreme Court has increasingly recognized this in its recent antitrust jurisprudence by moving away from inflexible per se rules of anticompetitive conduct that fail to differentiate between truly anticompetitive acts that hurt consumers and acts that merely hurt competitors: they are not the same thing. While the Court's Con Law decisions from yesterday got all the attention, the Leegin antitrust case, also handed down yesterday, marked another step in the court's walk away from per se standards toward a more flexible case-by-case analytical standard. Randy Picker explains the case at the University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog. Here is a pdf of the case itself.