Welcome to Antitrust

Welcome to Antitrust! Designed for 2Ls and 3Ls, this course features eight chapters of lesson videos, plus lesson and chapter practice questions.

The first chapter offers the necessary framework to start your journey into antitrust. It covers the origins of antitrust law, as well as key terms. It notes the history that led to the passage of the two major federal antitrust statutes, the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, as well as antitrust’s pro-competition goals. We define foundational terms, such as perfect and imperfect competition, market power, barrier to entry, and natural monopoly.

In the second chapter, we’ll expand on the core concepts covered in the previous chapter and learn about the scope of what activities antitrust law does and doesn’t cover. These topics include interstate and overseas commerce, organized labor, actions taken by state and local governments, and First Amendment and other immunities.

The third chapter begins the course’s substantive coverage of antitrust laws, focusing on horizontal restraints. This chapter contains lessons on defining markets, identifying horizontal agreements and per se violations of the antitrust laws, and the rule-of-reason analysis that applies to restraints that aren’t per se violations.

In the fourth chapter, we’ll go over vertical agreements. These lessons focus on resale price maintenance, vertical market allocation, and tying and exclusive dealing arrangements.

Next, in the fifth chapter, we’ll cover monopolization, including what is a monopoly, what monopolistic practices are forbidden by the antitrust laws, and how actors can violate the prohibitions on monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy to monopolize.

The sixth chapter covers price discrimination in the retail markets.

In the seventh chapter, we’ll look at merger regulation and the public and private avenues for enforcing the antitrust laws. These lessons will cover how the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission police mergers and how they bring civil or criminal cases against suspected antitrust violators. These lessons will also cover how private parties injured by antitrust violations may sue for damages, including what they must show to prove a case.

Finally, the eighth chapter will survey the global body of antitrust and competition law, with a focus on competition law in the European Union. It’ll also introduce the intersection of patent and antitrust laws, including the tensions that sometimes exist between them.

If you watch all the lesson videos and work through all the practice questions, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of one of the more challenging areas of the law that is antitrust. Let’s get