These are boom times for antitrust lawyers. Not only is the volume of high-paying work exploding. On March 21, the Department of Justice added Apple Inc. to the list of tech giants that are under scrutiny (the DoJ is already investigating Alphabet Inc. and the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms). Then on March 25, the European Union announced that it is investigating three of the four, Apple, Alphabet and Meta. The work also touches on the most profound questions of what monopoly means in an economy that’s increasingly based on information rather than physical stuff.

The debate is particularly interesting in America because it involves, in effect, a belated clash between two of the greatest legal minds of the 20th century. Louis Brandeis dubbed himself “the people’s lawyer” and exercised a profound influence over both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916 after a furious battle and remained there until 1939. Robert Bork was a conservative Republican who thrived under both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He was turned down for a seat on the Supreme Court in 1987 after an even more furious battle that gave US politics a new verb (“to Bork”) and provided a foretaste of antagonisms to come.

QOSHE - In US Antitrust War, Bet on Brandeis Not Bork - Adrian Wooldridge
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In US Antitrust War, Bet on Brandeis Not Bork

10 2
27.03.2024

These are boom times for antitrust lawyers. Not only is the volume of high-paying work exploding. On March 21, the Department of Justice added Apple Inc. to the list of tech giants that are under scrutiny (the DoJ is already investigating Alphabet Inc. and the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Amazon.com Inc.........

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