The Role of the State

Corporations can sidestep prosecution by cooperating with the government and offering up employees to avoid their own criminal liability. Ellen S. Podgor discusses two prominent reasons why the current approach to corporate criminality is inefficient.

ProMarket interviews Magali Eben and Giorgio Monti about changes to the disclosure policy of the The Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA) and the broader conversation on conflicts of interest in antitrust and competition scholarship.

In new research, Claire Liu and Jared Stanfield examine how relationships between corporate leaders and the United States president enable firms to capture regulation and avoid antitrust scrutiny.

Herbert Hovenkamp reviews Epic Games’ lawsuits against Apple and Google for restraining users’ ability to access Epic’s offerings through third-party app stores. A comparison of the two ecosystems sheds light on what remedies would improve benefits to consumers and how the Department of Justice’s own lawsuit against Apple may fare.

Diana Moss reviews four recent examples of the Trump administration weaponizing antitrust and regulation to stifle opposing ideological and political viewpoints.

As private corporations gain unprecedented control over public data, Americans are losing access to the information that underpins democracy and critical aspects of their lives. D. Victoria Baranetsky argues that this rise of secrecy—driven by the rising value of data and government privatization—demands not just transparency, but a bold commitment to anti-secrecy as essential to democratic governance.

It is an economic truism that markets operate more efficiently and fairly when there is more transparency. However, in the case of sovereign debt markets, the virtues of transparency are partially offset by its costs, writes Mark Weidemaier. Without an international regulator or bankruptcy court, opacity sometimes advances the public interest, including by helping financially distressed governments protect assets.

In new research, Benjamin Wood, Sven Gallasch, Nicholas Shaxson, Katherine Sievert, and Gary Sacks write that competition underenforcement and a narrow regulatory focus on prices and output has allowed industries that produce harmful consumer products, such as tobacco or ultra-processed foods, to increase demand and, consequentially, harm to society. They argue that competition law must evolve to consider health impacts.

The abundance movement, which seeks to lift the burden of inefficient regulation off the private sector to unleash equitable growth, has become the policy platform for many liberals. Dylan Gyauch-Lewis argues that the movement fails to account for the costs of externalities that many of the regulations it derides seek to address.

Gary Kalman writes that actions under the second Trump administration to dismantle recent anti-corruption initiatives, including those pioneered during the first Trump administration, will cost dearly the American and global economy and enable many of the nefarious actors President Trump has publicly admonished.