October 2011

by Nicole Flatow

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the rights of a New Jersey man whose drive home with his pregnant wife and four-year-old son ended in an invasive strip search at the jailhouse and seven days behind bars.

The plaintiff in this case, Albert W. Florence, tells the story of his wrongful arrest and subsequent treatment, in a podcast from the National Constitution Center and the American Constitution Society.

“Even thinking about it and even speaking about it still brings me, you know, chills,” Florence explains in “The Story Behind Florence v. Burlington.”

Florence's lawyer, Susan Chana Lask, recalls their momentous success at the district court level challenging the jail's blanket strip-search policy, and their loss on appeal. And Angela Davis, a law professor at American University, explains just what Florence is asking the Supreme Court to decide.

“He and his lawyers are not saying that prison officials should not have the right to search, even strip search, individuals who come into a criminal facility,” says Davis. “What they’re saying is there must be a reason.”

Part oral history, part legal commentary, this five-minute podcast is the first in a series that reveals the voices behind seminal Supreme Court cases. Watch Florence's story below, in advance of oral argument in the case, Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington, Oct. 12.

Editor’s Note: This is the final post in an ACSblog debate on antitrust scrutiny of Google between Harvard Business School Professor Benjamin G. Edelman and George Mason University School of Law Professor Joshua D. Wright. This online debate follows a recent U.S. Senate hearing on whether Google’s business practices “serve consumers” or “threaten competition.” See all the posts here.

By Joshua D. Wright, Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law

Professor Edelman’s opening post does little to support his case.  Instead, it reflects the same retrograde antitrust I criticized in my first post.

Edelman’s understanding of antitrust law and economics appears firmly rooted in the 1960s approach to antitrust in which enforcement agencies, courts, and economists vigorously attacked novel business arrangements without regard to their impact on consumers.  Judge Learned Hand’s infamous passage in the Alcoa decision comes to mind as an exemplar of antitrust’s bad old days when the antitrust laws demanded that successful firms forego opportunities to satisfy consumer demand.  Hand wrote:

we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel.

Antitrust has come a long way since then.  By way of contrast, today’s antitrust analysis of alleged exclusionary conduct begins with (ironically enough) the U.S. v. Microsoft decision.  Microsoft emphasizes the difficulty of distinguishing effective competition from exclusionary conduct; but it also firmly places “consumer welfare” as the lodestar of the modern approach to antitrust:

Whether any particular act of a monopolist is exclusionary, rather than merely a form of vigorous competition, can be difficult to discern: the means of illicit exclusion, like the means of legitimate competition, are myriad.  The challenge for an antitrust court lies in stating a general rule for distinguishing between exclusionary acts, which reduce social welfare, and competitive acts, which increase it.  From a century of case law on monopolization under § 2, however, several principles do emerge.  First, to be condemned as exclusionary, a monopolist's act must have an "anticompetitive effect.”  That is, it must harm the competitive process and thereby harm consumers.  In contrast, harm to one or more competitors will not suffice.

Nearly all antitrust commentators agree that the shift to consumer-welfare focused analysis has been a boon for consumers.  Unfortunately, Edelman’s analysis consists largely of complaints that would have satisfied courts and agencies in the 1960s but would not do so now that the focus has turned to consumer welfare rather than indirect complaints about market structure or the fortunes of individual rivals.