Antitrust Group

Canadian Class Actions Take A Step Forward

Canadian competition law litigation took a step forward last week with the decision in Irving Paper Ltd v. Atofina Chemicals Inc. et al., in which the Ontario Superior Court certified a consolidated class of direct and indirect purchasers in a horizontal price-fixing case involving the hydrogen peroxide industry.  The case has important precedential value as it represents the first time in Canada that an antitrust...

Constantine Pens A Timely And “Priceless” Tale Of Battling The Financial Giants

Constantine Cannon’s founding partner, Lloyd Constantine, has written a book that answers the timely question of how do you rescue an industry from the greed and anticompetitive conduct of financial giants?  Constantine’s answer was to lead an historic legal battle against Visa and Mastercard that led to those financial giants paying billions of dollars to America’s merchants. Constantine’s book,...

European Commission Publicizes Intel Emails In New Tack

Don’t put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want on the front page of the newspaper.  Or in a decision of the European Commission slapping a 1.06 billion Euros fine (approximately $1.5 billion) on your company.

On September 21, 2009, the Commission released a public version of its May 13 decision in which it imposed the record fine on Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer, for...

Review Of 1992 Merger Guidelines Is A Once-In-A-Generation Opportunity

Antitrust practitioners that pass on the upcoming opportunity to comment on revising the 1992 Merger Guidelines will be missing an opportunity that comes once in a generation. For 17 years now, the Horizontal Merger Guidelines jointly developed by the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have been one of a few doctrinal pillars of the faith among antitrust practitioners, most notably with respect...

Will The Microsoft-Yahoo Partnership Result In U.S. v. Microsoft Redux?

Antitrust enforcers may be seeing a lot of their old friends at Microsoft thanks to the Internet search deal the computer giant has reached with Yahoo!  As Constantine Cannon’s Matt Cantor discusses in his recent article, "Microsoft-Yahoo! 'Partnership' Is Anti-Competitive", the deal raises substantial antitrust issues that may doom it. It appears that Microsoft and Yahoo!'s proposed "partnership," which...

For Antitrust Enforcers, Causation Can Be The Matrix

“You see there is only one constant.  One universal.  It is the only real truth.  Causality.  Action, reaction.  Cause and effect.” -- The Merovingian in The Matrix Reloaded Characters in science fiction films such as The Matrix series and The Time Traveler’s Wife have struggled with life-or-death issues of causation.  As highlighted by recent decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District...

Justice Sotomayor's Pivotal Antitrust Decision

Though Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination hearings made lots of news, the media didn’t spend much time focusing on her antitrust decisions.  But the nation’s newest justice is no stranger to the Sherman Act. Constantine Cannon – as Lead Counsel in its groundbreaking debit card litigation – has first-hand experience with Justice Sotomayor's antitrust jurisprudence.  She authored a pivotal...

Will Congress Nix Resale Price Maintenance?

The chairmen of the House and Senate antitrust subcommittees are just saying no to the Supreme Court’s decision in Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 887 (2007).  Leegin overturned the Supreme Court’s 1911 Dr. Miles decision holding that resale price maintenance was per se illegal.  Both bills seek to reinstitute the per se rule by statute. On January 6, 2009, Chairman Herb Kohl...

Leading Congressional Dems Open Antitrust Front In Healthcare War

The Chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have joined forces to open a new – antitrust – front in the war for healthcare reform.  The two leading Democrats are seeking to boost healthcare reform with a partial repeal of an antitrust exemption that’s about as old as Democrats’ efforts to enact universal healthcare. On September 17, 2009, Chairman John Conyers (D.-Mich.) of the House...